Installation

In the installation "…baj batyry" (2007), five otherwise identical busts are distinguished solely by the decorations on their warrior’s helmets. Here is an obvious parallel to the uniformity of Kazakh monuments, which display only a single heroic figure. But since the cult of personality around President Nasarbayev has not yet completely blanketed Kazakhstan, the artist once again uses traits from his own portrait. In this sequence, which could be continued, and in this kind of depiction, the unchanging portrait becomes the impersonal type of a kind of ruler’s monument, which could appear in this or a similar way in any of the authoritarian systems of Central Asia’s oil- and gas-producing countries.