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11/4/2012

Almagul Menlibayeva and Sonia Balassanian

Motorenhalle, Dresden

The video artists Almagul Menlibayeva (*1969, Almaty) and Sonia Balassanian (*1950, Iran) both relate in a way to post communist global changes, in particular to the end of the Soviet Union. They trace present repercussions and their own autobiographical links to it. While New York-based Balassanian as diaspora-Armenian was only able to travel to the country of her fathers after the independence in 1991, Kazakh artist Menlibayeva was raised in Almaty and therefore able to experience closely the developments there since the late 1980s.

Sensitively, she tracks down symptoms of transformation, of lost utopias and failed promises of prosperity. She creates imaginative narratives by integrating colors and poetry of the Kazakh natives, the steppe dwellers. Equipped with her knowledge of Western life style, she unveils contrasts and critically comments influences of absurd consumption. Menlibayeva's video work 'Kurban' features the ruins of agricultural production cooperatives – once founded by deportees of the Stalin regime, in between them statuesque women, wrapped in a kind of shroud, posing like symbols of a world bygone.

Using a comparably poetic as well as archaic imagery and the documentary-like aesthetics of black and white film, Sonia Balassanian focuses on the country of Armenia. During the 20th century, Armenia was torn apart territorially, its people were oppressed and the course of its borders was at the mercy of external political and strategic interests. For her film 'Borders', she travelled to the ancient cultural heartland of Armenia that belongs to Turkey today, visiting prominent ruins of that very first Christian country of the world that has been shaken by various ideologies and pogroms.

The films of both artists, Sonia Balassanian and Almagul Menlibayeva, are densely charged with melancholy and mournfulness. At the same time they are characterized by a strong vigour, by the power of traditional mythologies and by an underlying longing for a local identity. Yet these films do not present idyllic exotic sceneries, but rather introduce different cultures as fertile grounds for ideas and as chances to change well-trodden perspectives. In a certain way, one could consider the themes of Menlibayeva and Balassanian as being part of a large postcolonial discourse that has never really been led: a discourse regarding the Soviet politics of expansion and its failures, including the present consequences for cultures that were subject of heteronomous interests for many decades.

The exhibition will be opened on Wednesday, April 11th, 2012, 20:00 in the presence of Almagul Menlibayeva and with an introduction by Susanne Altmann.


Lecture: Thursday, April 12th, 2012, 15.00 - Almagul Menlibayeva talks about her work (in English)

Motorenhalle
Wachsbleichstr. 4a - Dresden
Tue-Fri 16-20, Sa 14-18

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