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Creative Horizons: Art in the Post-Soviet Era Kristen Ho, Arizona State University In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic upended the world. At the Melikian Center, even as our plans for in-person programming fell apart, we wanted to find ways to stay connected to our community and to keep them connected to Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies. The disruption propelled us to address an urgent issue facing our field: the need to create programming that is relevant to both scholars in the field and a wider audience. One outcome of our efforts to meet this need has been Creative Horizons: Art in the Post-Soviet Era. An ongoing online collaboration between the Melikian Center at Arizona State University, the Havighurst Center at Miami University, Ohio and the University of South Florida’s Institute on Russia, the Creative Horizons series brings the work of artists from across the post-Soviet region to the public.
Lasts More than a Hundred Years. “Mankurt” has a second meaning relevant to Takenova’s work as a diasporic artist who feels disconnected from Kazakh traditions due to Soviet policies of Russification: a mankurt refers to a person who is uninterested in their own culture and history. During the 2019 election protests and subsequent repressions in Kazakhstan, Takenova created social media art in solidarity with the protestors.
This series introduces audiences to each artist through an interview produced by videographer Ari Gajraj. This interview is made available ahead of a live, online discussion moderated by an expert from one of the three universities. Thanks to the magic of the internet, we travel seamlessly between Arizona, Ohio, and Florida—and on to Russia, Belarus, Hungary, Ukraine, and the U.K. Our featured artists, united under the umbrella term of “post-Soviet,” create within a wide range of perspectives and forms. To give you an idea of the kinds of topics we explore in the Creative Horizons series, two of the artists, animator Ermina Takenova and writer Kateryna Babkina, agreed to be interviewed for this issue of NewsNet.
Ermina Takenova Ermina Takenova is a London-based animator and illustrator from Almaty, Kazakhstan. Takenova researches Kazakh culture and folklore to create digital art pieces which explore contemporary issues. The title of her 2019 animated short film, Mankurt, is representative of her cultural explorations: “mankurt” is a figure from Turkic mythology, an unthinking slave created through torture. Many became familiar with the mankurt via Chingiz Aitmatov’s popular novel, The Day
Why did you decide to create Kazakh art, and how has this act of creation shaped your relationship with your culture? I wouldn’t call what I do Kazakh art specifically, as traditional Kazakh art is mainly rooted in craft practices. I’d say my art is deeply inspired by
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