"Art of Kazakhstan in the Contexts of the Global Art Processes: 1920–2020" lecture series

The eight-lecture course traces the emergence and development of professional art in Kazakhstan through a comparative perspective. Despite the country’s near-complete isolation for over seventy years, artists in Kazakhstan nevertheless succeeded in forming a distinct artistic school, characterized by its own individual features and a unique creative methodology.

At the same time, it is impossible to disregard the influence of global artistic processes, which - depending on political, economic, and social conditions manifested themselves to varying degrees in the work of artists in Kazakhstan.

The comparative historical excursions offered throughout the course contribute to an understanding of the remarkable intensity of the artistic process in Kazakhstan over the course of the past century.

Lecture series consists of 8 lectures:

Lecture 1. 1920–1930. Modernism: between two world wars. The Turkestan-Siberian railway and the export of European-style art to Soviet Asia.

Lecture 2. 1930s–1940s. Totalitarian art. Germany, USSR, China

Lecture 3. 1950s–1960s. Avant-garde movements in Europe. Socialist realism and its objectives in Kazakhstan

Lecture 4. 1950s–1960s. Avant-garde movements in the USA. Khrushchev's Thaw and the Kazakh Sixties

Lecture 5. 1970s–1980s. Western art institutions and the formation of new discourses. Kazakhstan: Transavanguardia without the Avant-Garde

Lecture 6. 1990s. Born with Independence: Contemporary Art of Kazakhstan. Actionism and performance art.

Lecture 7. 2000s. Video art in Kazakhstan.

Lecture 8. 2010s. Contemporary art in Kazakhstan and international projects. Public art and the democratisation of urban spaces.

We invite you to join the lecture series to explore together how art in Kazakhstan has taken shape through dialogue with global artistic processes of the 20th and 21st centuries.