Cultural Memory and Trauma in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan: Art as Research

This practice research responds to the need to reflect on the Stalinist legacy in Kazakhstan, a post-Soviet, former nomadic, Central Asian state. Setting artmaking in dialogue with theories of collective memory and trauma, this research concerns the role of artistic practice in the formation and revision of cultural memory of traumatic historical events. Its specific focus falls on the missing memory of Asharshiliq, the man-made famine in Kazakhstan in 1931 – 1933. In this thesis, by means of artistic practice as research, I propose that art can act as a medium of memory. Motivated by personally situated knowledge, my research reflects on my position as a postgeneration artist; it elaborates the concept of postmemory defined by Marianne Hirsch as memory of postgenerations to survivors of atrocities. I attempt to create an image for the event that remains erased, invisible, fragmentary, so as to explore the potential of art in facilitating the processes of mourning, understood in Sigmund Freud's terms as gradual de-identification with the loss-object.

The thesis is structured around two artworks that I created in my research. Part one describes, analyses, and theorises the making of my hand-drawn animation film All the Dreams We Dream (2017 – 2020), from the initial working with memory-fragments (texts of memoirs, photographs) to the creation of an audio-visual image of the event using hand-drawing, animating, and cinematising. In particular, Chapter 4 sets my methods in dialogue with Freud's concept of Dream-work, and Maurice Halbwachs' 'act of memory'. It demonstrates how the artistic creation of an oneiric image of a traumatising event speaks to both concepts, allowing re-cognising a floating impression or an affect that escape language, and translation into the visual what only exists as text. Part two addresses what I call the post-Soviet condition. Chapter 6 focuses on my mixed-media work Windows of Tolerance (2016 – 2017), which treats the phenomenon of a barred window as a symbol and symptom of the lasting Sovietness. With haptic durational practices of hand-drawing, hand-embroidery, animation, and montage, I touch upon the ethical aspect of remaining with the memory of the event seen in dialogue with Bracha Ettinger’s concept of wit(h)nessing, which involves prolonged attention to the suffering other. In the final section, I situate my intervention, aesthetically and theoretically, in relation to contemporary postgeneration artworks confronting the Post-Soviet Condition.