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Email PageInto the Future
June 15, 2006- July 29, 2006
Reception: June 15, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev
Winkleman Gallery
637 W 27th StPlus Ultra Gallery is extremely pleased to present Into the Future, the first New York solo exhibition by Kyrgyz artists Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev. Collaborating for many years, the husband-wife artists are renowned for their documentary-style video installations and photography exploring the ramifications of political upheaval and modernization.
Working in their hometown of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, which has been the center of change and protest since the collapse of the Soviet Union and recent overthrow of the widely criticized administration of former Kyrgyz president, Askar Akayev, Kasmalieva and Djumaliev exhibit here their 2005 dual-channel video installation “Into the Future.” Filmed in Siberia, “Into the Future” offers a direct and thoughtful verification of the effects of change and transformation. Through the juxtaposition of slowly changing images of industrial wastelands and the matter-of-fact recording of people boarding a ferry, they offer a complex, non-ironic look into that ambiguous point at which the future becomes the present and how we cope with that.
In addition, Kasmalieva and Djumaliev present a selection of photographs from their “New Menhirs” series. Referencing the giant stone structures (or “menhirs”) that jut out of the ground, marking prehistoric burial grounds, throughout Central Asia, this series catalogs desolate, often destroyed landscapes of factories and their surroundings. Standing, like menhirs, as monuments to a lost epoch, the ghostly structures in these images symbolize the contemporary stagnation that has replaced the brighter future they once promised.
Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev’s work has been exhibited extensively around the world, including in the Central Asian Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale; the OK Centre for Contemporary Art for ‘Biennale Cuvee’ in Linz, Austria; the Ujazdowski Castle Contemporary art Centre in Warsaw, Poland; and the Sydney Mishkin gallery in New York. Their work will also be included in the upcoming Singapore Biennale which opens in September 2006.
Art Reviews of Into the Future
| The New Yorker July 24, 2006 | unknown | "...In this case, the monuments are, again, crumbling factories in a fantasy land of almost beautiful desolation...." |
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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