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Erbol Meldibekov: I am a re-circumcised piece of foreskin in action.

This whole text is addressed to the very last reader of this issue, you, who found this dusty copy of PAP in a trash pile in his grandma’s attic, together with a hundred-year-old stash of cocaine and the last Spank Rock album. Wow, your old granny was quite something, wasn’t she? Who could have guessed. Anyways, dear future reader, just wanted to let you know that this issue was published at the great moment of human history, when the Irony stood its last trial. The most recent attempt at public irony on religious subject just ended in bloody clashes all over the world, leaving humanity at loss whether it should be permitted at all. Apparently, it has now become the role of the governments to react seriously to silly pranks and demand satisfaction over bad jokes.

So, dear future reader, please-please-please, jump into your shiny time machine and come back here to tell me how it all worked out in the end and if in your time there are death sentences for laughs or no. (And, you can actually arrive at this very moment when I’m writing this, so that in the end this text would never come out and we’d run into some amazing time paradox... Oh well.) No, really, I must know. Because at the moment, irony is left only to the craftiest ones, to the smartest insiders who practice it with such virtuosity that it is left unclear who is the subject of irony, and thus they cannot be persecuted.

One such clever trickster is Kazakh artist Erbol Meldibekov (b.1964) – his works are way too ambiguous to be understood as strictly ironic, so Kazakhstan authorities just labeled them as “anti-national” and mostly let the artist be, at the moment. But still, as the artist puts it himself:

The work I do is unpleasant for the authorities; it does not fit into their set standards.

Now, please note that a less intricate try at combining words “Kazakhstan” and “irony” resulted in an international scandal: last year, comedian Sacha Baron Cohen was threatened with legal action by Kazakh authorities for bad behavior of one of his TV characters, a “Kazakh reporter” Borat. The authorities sought to disprove publicly Borat’s tales about professional Kazakh gipsy hunters and dog-shooting as the country’s favorite sport. Of course, how would we, silly Westerners, know otherwise that these facts were not true?

Contemporary Kazakhstan is a country of striking contrasts between unimaginable oil wealth enjoyed by the few and deep economic troubles experienced by the country at the whole. The president openly admits his preference of “stability” in place of democracy. Any opposing political actions are violently suppressed, and opposition leaders killed. Meldibekov describes it as a dead-end path chosen not only by Kazakhstan, but by most countries in the region:

In this global time Central Asia can give only oil and violence to the world. And this situation is a deadlock.

The cruelty of history might be the only way out of this deadlock. History in Meldibekov’s work is presented in its transition: it is as real as everybody's notion of it is. The forgotten hero ceases to exist: only four taxidermied horse legs are left arranged on a stand in a position reminding of any classical “on horse” statue. It is “A Monument to a Hero”, in which the hero himself, together with the rest of his horse, has been sliced off by the passing of the historical mower. It is a powerful metaphor of devaluation of history, a clear artistic statement on the worth of historical myths:

It seems to me that we live in the time when the criteria for heroes are changing.

In his video “Pastan 2” Meldibekov offers himself to be slapped and debased under the gaze of the passers-by: those who see this act of violence sometimes appear to be shocked, sometimes frightened or just simply disinterested, but nobody dares to interfere. The work observes the acceptance of aggression in the society and the cultural norms of non-interference. In the traditional society, power gives one the right to violence, and this custom leads to the acceptance of totalitarian regime. Meldibekov, being an insider, himself a born Kazakh, has a right to criticize this tradition and uses it in his work, creating provocative images of Asian society.

A photograph from Pol Pot series shows a bunch of human heads sticking out from the desert sand among impaling spikes, in artist’ attempt at reviving the aesthetics of Genghis Khan Era. It supposedly addresses the barbarism of the traditional Asian culture, but on the second glance, I’m not so sure about this. On left side of the image, there is a large, clearly visible shadow of a person who is taking the picture from outside the frame, not dissimilar to the effect we so often see on tourists’ snapshots from exotic locations. This obviously deliberate effect hints on the place of the spectator in relation to the work – as an ignorant curious gawker, looking for a nicely wrapped candy of “authenticity”, maybe even being prepared for a mild cultural shock in the middle of its exotic sweetness. Meldibekov points out that even critics sometimes fall into his classic colonial attitude:

I live in a place where everything is possible. Western critics look for exotica and ethnography, not reality.

Meldibekov plays with our prejudices of Asia, throwing into our faces exactly what we want to see – images of violence, barbarism and cruelty. The artist begins mocking our expectations already by introducing himself: during the opening days of Venice Biennial, Meldibekov told everyone that he was from Pastan. Most, hearing the familiar ending, did not inquire further, placing this imaginary country on a map in the unclear area where all the “–stans” are located. However, as everything in Meldibekov’s body of work, Pastan is more than a joke:

Pastan is a virtual country. It is my project, as Bin Laden’s Waziristan.

Not regarding the fact that terrorism is supposed to be a taboo subject for irony, Meldibekov often calls himself an “art-terrorist”. Using brutal material for his works, he aims to provoke and shock his spectator, to solicit strong emotions. He sees it as a difference between Western and Asian art practices, the latter being just plain tougher, more brutal and less reflective.

While someone is sending suicide bombers, I am a re-circumcised piece of foreskin in action. I speak ironically about this time, situation and terrorism trough corporeality and sexuality.

The comment refers specifically to the project I am Hypermuslim, exhibited as a series of photographs scrupulously documenting the process of Meldibekov’s second circumcision. The idea of the project is that having been circumcised twice, the artist becomes twice more Muslim, or even Hypermuslim. (I know exactly what’s on your mind right now, so let’s get it over with once and for all:

- Was it awfully painful to have your second circumcision? - No, only the first time it was painful. We used painkillers for the second, so no, it wasn’t painful.)

Meldibekov deliberately uses striking, physically repulsive images to get a strong reaction from you, to establish a connection. It is a love-hate relationship he wants to build with his audience, an emotionally powerful link that might, or might not, afterwards trigger understanding. There is no such thing as audience’ participation in his work, the exchange between the artist and the viewer is more like a war, where you have first to fight off the first shock, then to struggle through all the layers of irony and then, maybe, get to something that would resemble a meaning - only to lose it again in the ambush of the next work. “My Brother, My Enemy”, showing the artist and his brother facing each other with the guns protruding out of their mouth, illustrates this encounter rather well.