Almagul Menlibayeva (born 1969 in Almaty, Kazakhstan) is an award-winning contemporary artist who works mostly in multi-channel video, photography and mixed media installation. She lives and works in Germany and Kazakhstan. Her work has been featured internationally at the Sydney Biennale, Australia; the Venice Biennale; the Moscow Biennale, Russia; and the Gangwon International Biennale, South Korea. Menlibayeva’s work addresses issues such as critical explorations of Soviet modernity; social, economic, and political transformations in post-Soviet Central Asia; and decolonial reimaginings of gender, environmental degradation, and Eurasian nomadic and indigenous cosmologies and mythologies. A winner of the Main Prize of Munich’s Kino der Kunst International Film Festival (2013), Menlibayeva was awarded the French Ministry of Culture’s Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2017.
Almagul Menlibayeva
Articles illustrated by Almagul Menlibayeva:
Good Morning, Beautiful World
in Issue 100 | Holes (Jul 2022)Between the discovery of the Gilboa prison break and the recapture of its last escapee, six exhilarating days during which the dominant feeling was of holding onto a rope in the ocean, a lifeline pulling us backward and forward in time, tying us into knots, binding us together.
The Sadomasochistic Cenote and Its Legal Upwellings
in Issue 100 | Holes (Jul 2022)Unenforceable sex contracts—the kind that establish distributions of power between dom and sub in SM role play—follow the same formula as regular old contracts. As an arena of performance, court proceedings also partake in sadomasochistic power play. None of this should be surprising. If sadomasochism can borrow from the legal sphere, why not the other way around?
“A Nomad’s Worry” and “Time Passes”
in Issue 100 | Holes (Jul 2022)I want to say: once again, each of us a narrative— / a partial dream—mechanical animals tied to the / fading light of memory.
in Issue 100 | Holes (Jul 2022)
I’m Dying Here, Tell the Prime Minister
in Issue 100 | Holes (Jul 2022)When I tell the locals that I moved to Armenia on my own and that my family has no idea where I am, they seem surprised, or they get pitiful and offer me help. One guy said, “It’s so cool.” Random old men start asking me for a blow job.
“I Will Take the Not-Easy Task”: An Interview with Almagul Menlibayeva
in Issue 100 | Holes (Jul 2022)My great-grandmother, she was a person who witnessed and was practicing nomadism. And my grandmother, she was a person who was already settled and was saying, “OK, I’m going to live in the village, you know, in the kolkhoz.” She became a village person. She lost her nomadism. The language remains, but it’s a different language. It’s a settled language, the language of people who worked for the kolkhoz or sovkhoz.