Punk Shamanism,revolt and break-up of traditional linkage: The waves of cultural production in post-Soviet Kazakhstan

Introduction

This article analyses new waves of cultural production in late Soviet and post-Soviet realities of the national republics. Through the example of the Punk Shamanism movement in Kazakhstan, the second largest post-Soviet state after Russia, I explore how artists accommodated to the new reality of political and cultural independence of their nation and how they tried to re-conceptualize discourses on national identity and national belonging. Punk Shamanism is a new wave of cultural production identified with the search for lost memory and cultural codes, erased or diluted by Soviet propaganda and ‘war’ against local (Kazakh) nationalism. Focusing on such discourses as nomadism, shamanism, the land and the steppe that were previously considered ‘backward’, ‘uncivilized’ and certainly unwelcomed by the Soviet cultural frameworks, the new generation of postsocialist cultural producers attempted to bare these contradictions. To them, shamans and nomads were in no way backward but rather authentic and real in comparison with the rigid and hegemonic perspective of the Soviet literary and artistic canons of Socialist Realism.

The term ‘Punk Shamanism’ represents the new wave of art and cultural production in post-Soviet Kazakhstan which focuses on the local and globalized perceptions of the nation and the Self in that cultural production. The term was coined by one of the most renowned Kazakhstani artists, a Russian-speaking Kazakh, Almagul Menlibayeva who works in Berlin. Menlibayeva first came up with the concept prior to her first exhibition outside Kazakhstan. Punk Shamanism was born out of the artist’s credo ¹ that the curators asked Menlibayeva to present:

We needed to define this something original, our local, home grown. […] I always felt that in some other country there were a lot of artists and the state took care of them, provided some conditions for their work, they [Others] had all types of foundations, damn!, and we [artists in Kazakhstan in the beginning of the 1990s] did not have much, we were surviving back then. And I felt sorry […] about it so I created this new wave of Punk Shamanism, as if back there somewhere in that magical steppe there were so many people who were part of this artistic movement, Punk Shamanism. And I was happy when people told me, there must be a lot of you, artists of the new wave there. It was important to create a character that was real, maybe not as unified as I imagined it, but a real movement, authentic, built on the traditions of shamanism and Tengriism, to make people, who knew nothing about Kazakhstan, believe that there was something interesting there, something worth discovering. ²

The concept of Punk Shamanism consisted of two important aspects combined in this self-perception: revolting against the Soviet dominant system of the production of meaning and returning to the historical authenticity defined by Shamanism. Although Menlibayeva and Maslov put the name on it, the overall framework of Punk Shamanism developed independently from the specific grouping. It is true that the Green Triangle art group to which Menlibayeva belonged in the late 1980s helped her and many other artists to form their ideas about the ‘authentic’ Kazakh art, but other artists who followed the Punk Shamanism trend were not always members of particular groups. Kazakhstani contemporary art scene is relatively compact which explains how artists are connected to certain networks and groups, and how there is a constant communication between them. Punk Shamanism is not a distinct art group like Kokserek, Green Triangle or Red Traktor, it is a movement defined by certain recurrent discourses and narratives any artist may engage with but may not directly identify with. In this article, I use it as an analytical framework.

Similar to the musical punk movements in Russia and Estonia, punk shamanistic artists of Kazakhstan gathered in informal underground movements and explored ways of cultural manifestation of the denial and revolt against the official propaganda machine. In this process, they were making their first attempts to juxtapose their ideas of ‘authenticity’ against the forged and constructed, and thus, non-authentic ideas proposed by the state which are propagandistic in nature. In this article, I define national ‘authenticity’ as the power of authority to define the ultimate ‘truth’ about the nation, in this case, the Kazakh nation. This type of authenticity is also closely connected to the concept of the expressive authenticity ‘having to do with an object’s character as a true expression of an individual’s or a society’s values and beliefs’ (Dutton, 2003: 3), where independent artists claim that their version of the nation is more powerful and important because they are not state-sponsored and thus not propagandistic.

In their own definition of authenticity, post-Soviet contemporary artists were also driven by the ideas of social responsibility for their co-nationals, and as some of them described it later, by the ideas to break away from the propaganda and ‘tell the truth’ instead. This powerful narrative of possessing the knowledge to define truth is what made their revolt possible. Although their movement was highly localized within the domains of the biggest urban centre (Alma-Ata) of Kazakhstan, the power and the fame of their movement and revolt ‘in the name of authenticity’ allowed contemporary artists to spread these ideas further and also long after their initial movement was formed in the late 1980s.

With this revolt, the shamans were represented as spiritual conductors and transmitters of knowledge, traditions and customs of tribes and communities (Auezov, 1973; see also Humphrey, 1999). The ‘punk’ part of the movement represented a break with mainstream culture and provision of new forms of resistance and cultural production (Hebdige, 1979). This new cultural production aimed to criticize old approaches to cultural and propagandistic understanding of national lineage and continuity of the nation which was the backbone of Soviet cultural production and understanding of the nation. With the production of a new form, Punk Shamanism intended to break away from the state-sponsored narratives of ‘constructed’ and ‘artificial’ ‘inauthentic’ identities and national discourses.

The first postsocialist generation of Kazakhstani artists still tend to focus on similar discourses of ‘imagined geographies’ and historical searching. In other words, while the forms of contemporary art (including different artistic mediums) provided a new space for self-representation, the content to represent the nation remained the same. ‘Imagined geographies’ were the most straightforward and natural way to express their vision about the nation – their imagination was defined by the conventional understanding of the nation as a state with the stable territory and with the indisputable power over its land. In many ways, this approach was more than understandable as many of these artists described their Soviet experience as colonization. The power to control one’s own national land, and to imagine it as ‘ours’, led to these highly popular discourses of ‘imagined geographies’.

In this article, I focus on these discourses and searches through the example of Kazakhstani contemporary artists in their struggle to define national ‘authenticity’ – the role ascribed to the power of the officialdom. The authenticity argument emerged in this field as a legacy of the Soviet system and state-sponsored art of socialist realism where ‘the Soviet state appropriated artistic labour explicitly in terms of making political propaganda’ (Nauruzbayeva, 2011a: 12).

Postsocialist state-sponsored or ‘official’ art was juxtaposed with the production of independent and non-state-sponsored artists who tried to break away from the state-centric cultural production and narratives in their search for the ultimate truth. This postsocialist and post-Soviet cultural transformation alienated itself from the legacies of Soviet state domination and censorship advocating for cultural renewal (Adams, 1999, 2010; Brubaker, 2011; Velmet, 2011). Kazakhstani contemporary artists positioned themselves within the framework of ‘Art of social relevance’, where ‘an artist’s first and foremost function and responsibility is to serve their society’ (Nauruzbayeva, 2011b: vii) and is very similar to the Soviet call for social responsibility of art.

The postsocialist transformation of culture, defined here as the need to produce new spaces of unofficial and authentic cultural production, then led many independent artists to focus on the theme of the nation and its problems. In this way, both independent and state-sponsored art continued to focus on similar narratives and themes explored in the Soviet period. The revolt against the old paradigm led to the reproduction of these narratives due to two factors: the inescapability of the ‘nationalist narratives’ in cultural production and the ‘social responsibility’ of the independent artists to focus on these issues. In order to unpack this argument, I briefly consider the context and dominant narratives of cultural production in Kazakhstan in the next section. In the latter part of the article, I focus on how independent artists used to produce informal groupings instead of the state institutionalization of artists and their production during late Soviet and early post-Soviet period.

By positioning this study in the field of cultural and artistic production, the article contributes to the understanding of contestations and power struggles in defining the nation beyond just political terms but also in the cultural and artistic field. These findings demonstrate how in the period of crucial socio-political but also socio-cultural transformations the contemporary artists were able to take over in the production of the alternative discourses about the nation and national culture. The article also contributes to the study of the least researched yet very distinct and vivid field of postsocialist Central Asian art field.

Narratives

On 16 December 1991, the Republic of Kazakhstan declared its independence. Kazakhstan’s history traces back to a nomadic union of tribes who occupied a vast territory in the Eurasian steppe in the 15th century. After the October Revolution of 1917, Kazakhstan was incorporated into the Soviet Union and in 1936, it was formed into the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic which in 1991 became a sovereign republic of the Republic of Kazakhstan. During this turbulent period of historical and social changes, the Kazakh cultural elites engaged in a laborious process of building a nation.

The categorization of narratives in the cultural production of texts that describe and open up the discourses about the nation, national and nationness was formalized in Kazakhstan in the 1960s–1970s with the production of the so-called nationalistic narratives (see Kudaibergenova, 2013, 2016a). At the time of Khrushchev’s Thaw, the literary field produced and conceptualized the nationalistic narratives which represented the distinct national identity of Kazakhs.

The category of the so-called nationalistic narratives in cultural production or narratives about the nation expand to the consideration of ‘imagined geographies’, national heritage and important issues such as language and cultural oppression. In this section, I consider how contemporary, post-Soviet cultural producers approached all three narratives in the specific realm of Kazakh postsocialist culture. Two aspects are of particular importance here: I consider post-Soviet development of these narratives in a temporal domain partially described by the cultural producers themselves. It defines the temporal break from the Soviet reality (defined by the oppressive communist and people’s friendship ideology) to the ambiguous time period of post-Soviet Kazakhstan of the nation-in-the-making. Kazakh postsocialist culture is defined here from the perspective of the cultural and spatial transformation within the field of cultural production – with the break-up of the institutional and ideological support and frameworks, contemporary artists and writers were now left to define their own rules of the game but also their own narratives in art and literature. This task was heavily occupied by those ‘independent’ or non-state-sponsored artists. These were the cultural producers who had no links to the new ruling political regime or its institutions, who did not depend on state support financially or institutionally ³ and who had to create the market for themselves – usually abroad.

Both groups of the state-sponsored and ‘independent’ non-state-sponsored artists in contemporary Kazakhstan focused on three important nationalistic narratives of cultural production: imagined geographies, Kazakh language and heritage, and the cultural oppression and glory of independence.

Towards cosmopolitan national art? Who are the punk shamans?

In the field of independent cultural producers in Kazakhstan, state institutional support was initially substituted by the informal grouping of artists who gathered and produced their work with no official financial aid. Many of the artists recall being sponsored by friends, family members and some by foreign foundations. Many existed on their own and were self-sustained.

There are two important artistic groups in Kazakhstan to consider ⁵ – Shymkent-based Kyzyl Traktor (Red Tractor) and formerly Almaty-based Zeleniy Treugol’nik (Green Triangle). Both groups produced the most famous works about the Kazakh nation both abroad and domestically.

For a very long time, Kyzyl Traktor (Red Tractor) artists were considered more ‘nationalistic’ than the Zeleniy Treugol’nik (Green Triangle) group. In one of the interviews that I conducted with artists in 2011, the respondent said, ‘For Kazakh-speaking artists it is more natural to focus on those themes connected to their native land’ and thus connected to the Kazakh language they speak. ⁶ However, these distinctions are marginal and not static as many artists shift across themes but remain in the same field of above-mentioned narratives. In my interviews with the members of the former Green Triangle group, they also focused on the ideas of the land (imagined geography) and their relation to the Kazakh nation through Russian rather than the Kazakh language.

These socio-linguistic divisions, however, do not stop artists from the production of what they perceive as an ‘authentic’ national product. Authenticity in this sense is depicted through the independent search for the lost heritage and through the re-interpretation of the national without the rigid ‘Sovietized’ frameworks and codification of ethnicity or language. This idea of freedom of expression and independent search is at the heart of the punk shamanistic approach – in its inability to re-create, enact the past, re-interpret it through the use of contemporary means of knowledge, globalized perceptions, media and postsocialist understanding of the Self. In other words, punk shamans provide a hybrid understanding of the ‘national’, framing it in the contemporary space where Kazakhstan is nowadays. This ability to re-interpret rather than re-construct the past through art is what separates independent artists from their state-sponsored counterparts who tend to fixate on the theatrical re-creation of the past in their works. State-sponsored art works, for example, tend to focus on the historical depictions of nomadic rulers, khans or historical reconstruction of nomadic lifestyle in the steppe – a typical set of ‘rigid’ nomadic art available in many public museums in Kazakhstan.

Kyzyl Traktor (Red Tractor) art group and the former members of the Green Triangle group are able to navigate nationalistic narratives in their art work regardless of the Kazakh or Russian socio-linguistic divisions. Members of both groups focus on themes of ‘cosmopolitanism’ combined with the search for the national sense of the Self. One of Said Atabekov’s (Red Tractor member) works, for example, is a set of international flags sewn from the traditionally Kazakh material of korpe – large cushion-type material. In her earlier works Almagul Menlibayeva’s (former Green Triangle member) also used traditionally Kazakh or Central Asian materials (felt) and ornaments (tekemet) in her hybrid artistic production. Menlibayeva and Syrlybek Bekbotayev (current Red Tractor member) both focused on the history of Gulags in Kazakhstan and participated in the ‘Archipelago Gulag’ 2016 exhibition in Astana National Museum.

In her previous works, Menlibayeva used geographical landscapes, old Soviet buildings (factories, closed nuclear testing polygons) and depicted Kazakh women dressed up either in national dress or in very modern clothing overtaking landscape, presenting their power as central at these landscapes. Highly successful and widely known abroad, these artists who are not foreign to Venetian biennale choose to transmit and express their ideas of the nation through various Kazakhified yet universal artistic languages and forms.

Mankurstan novel too is calling for the national awakening as much among Kazakhs as among other Kazakhstani peoples, specifically Russians, Tatars, Germans, Koreans and so on, pays great attention to the themes of purely nationalistic texts such as Kazakh language, territory, important Kazakhified cultural components, for example, institute of oral singing of Aytis, is unsurprisingly written in Russian. The novel is addressed to the wider multi-ethnic citizenry of Kazakhstan in an attempt to give them a ‘wake-up call’ for an authoritarian regime and societal political indifference. Many of the above-mentioned artists share these views of the writer.

In her works, Menlibayeva focuses on the traditional themes of linkage and heritage and on the disjuncture of the traditional culture. These themes include typical nomadic celebrations of weddings, funerals and childbirth as well as pre-Islamic Tengriism (see Laruelle, 2007). Most recently, she started focusing on Soviet history of Kazakhstan: gulags and nuclear testing polygons.

Heritage and historical linkage and lost continuity are at the heart of Saule Suleimenova’s I am Kazakh series. These are a set of portraits of the 19th century archival photographs of Kazakh women positioned in the background of contemporary urban settings of Kazakhstani cities. Both Menlibayeva and Suleimenova were members of the Green Triangle group among other talented contemporary Kazakh artists and established their own careers. Suleimenova also comes from a cultural intellectual background – her father, Timur Suleimenov, was the member of another informal group Zhas Tulpar (1960s–1970s). Zhas Tulpar was an oppositional cultural movement that included Olzhas Suleimenov and Murat Auezov, which opposed the cultural assimilation of Kazakhs in the Soviet Union. So Suleimenova opposes the re-creation of the historical past and linkages, which she ascribes to state-sponsored artists:

We have this post-Soviet, post-imperial complex [of inferiority], we want to prove [someone] that we mean a lot and we do it by inventing ‘cool’ myths about our history. People believe in it but that is just imagined, constructed. The older generation loves it whereas a younger generation accepts it as a given. Our main problem is that the state [gosudarstvo] lives on its own and it exists in parallel to the real science and art. There is no real intersection of the two. ⁷

The generational change is what is important in Suleimenova’s perceptions of heritage and continuity. She believes she has culturally ‘transformed’ and differentiated herself from the ‘conformist generation’ of those state-sponsored cultural elites and artists of the mid-1980s who did not support the 1986 December movement in Alma-Ata. In mid-December 1986, Gorbachev replaced a long-term Kazakh leader, Dinmukhamed Kunaev, with a Russian named Gennady Kolbin; this spurred the first wave of protests in the Soviet Union. Kazakh youth gathered on the central square of the capital city (then Alma-Ata) for a peaceful protest against the ‘single-handed’ decision from Moscow about the highest political appointment in the republic.

What happened on 16–17 December 1986 is still not quite known as there are many accounts of the ‘bloody repression’ of this revolt; the exact numbers of victims are unknown but those who died in prison or on the way there became famous symbols of the fight for independence for many Kazakh nationalist groups. At the time of the protests, many local intelligentsia wrote official letters denouncing the protestors and blaming them for ‘nationalistic actions’ and ‘drug abuse’. In the post-Soviet period, December 1986 protests turned into an ambiguous political symbol. In late 2000s, the local administration of Almaty erected a monument to the victims of the protest near the square but the ruling regime rarely addresses these events. Many members of the protests formed numerous non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and dispersed movements under the Zheltoksan (December) narrative. What is clear though is that December 1986 is part of a complex romantic national discourse interpreted differently by the groups who use it.

Revolt

Given the history of underground movements in Soviet Kazakhstan – the success and romanticism of Zhas Tulpar, for example, Green Triangle’s history also became highly romanticized. It was one of the numerous art groups that consisted of 20 young artists, poets, philosophers and intellectuals. Green Triangle formed as a revolt wave against Soviet totalitarianism and as an opportunity for its members to express themselves openly within this little artistic public sphere. In the words of one of the members of Green Triangle, Almagul Menlibayeva,

We were a like-minded community of people who wanted to find out something beyond that official ideology which was a pure lie as we all exposed it in the 1990s. […] We used to travel to the mountains [with other members of Green Triangle], set fire and scream, sing, howl, imitating shamans in our search for the ‘authenticity’. So I remember at that time I got very interested with traditional nomadic art of woollen products and ornaments – tekeme. You had to use real sheep wool and there was a whole traditional process of how to make it. We did it in a typical Soviet urban apartment in Almaty and I remember the smell of wool when men were beating it [while processing it into the tekeme material]. It was a magical feeling of the ‘authentic’ Kazakh culture. […]Although I was always aware of our, Kazakhs’ cultural amnesia – we were cut off from our traditional nomadic culture too abruptly and all the attempts to come back are not only useless but also counter-productive. ⁸

Menlibayeva also recalled how Green Triangle ceased to exist only a few years after the collapse of the totalitarian system they were revolting against and how this community created a new generation of revolting youth, among them herself and her friend Saule Suleimenova, both of whom now deny the traditional and official cliché of national heritage and national imagination:

Right now is a very difficult moment [for the nation and national self-determination]. We should not go back to the fifteenth century. If the country and culture wants to be viable and capable, we [as a nation] should not go back to the fifteenth century [in search of national idea] but we have to re-consider everything that has happened [during this historical period from the formation of Kazakh tribes in the fifteenth century until contemporary times] and this re-consideration of our history and our contemporary reality has to happen fast. The success of this whole process depends on people who live in Kazakhstan now. I’m not disappointed in that typical idea but rather I am alarmed that many people in Kazakhstan are waiting for just one person to come and change everything. It is absolutely not like that – the change must happen from within, from the collective will. People of Kazakhstan need to realize one important idea and form a unified energy towards this one goal – we are building a new ethnos of all of us together, of all the Kazakhstani people. We have this tendency to talk about Kazakh language and pressure non-Kazakh speakers, discriminate them on that matter, why aren’t you learning the language and so on. I think this is a split because we all need to have one goal and we need to think alike about the final goal and how to reach it. ⁹

Menlibayeva’s discussion about the unified nation of Kazakhstani people [narod Kazakhstana] rather than the ethno-socially fragmented version of contemporary nation-building is not a novel idea. Many contemporary artists and writers in Kazakhstan advocate for the unification in nation-building rather than further division based on either ethnic or cultural and linguistic differences. A contemporary Kazakh-speaking writer, Mukhtar Magauin, wrote about the formation of a likeminded civil society in Kazakhstan in his 1996 novel, Men (‘I’). Civil society and not the ethnic ‘communal apartment’ of the Soviet-type nationalities policy (Slezkine, 1994) is also the central theme of Mankurtstan (2011). Finally, a strong Kazakhstani civil society as a warranty for development became the main message of alternative musician, Takezhan, who produced a music video for his song ‘Kazakhstan-2050’ in December 2013.

Takezhan’s video has a similar context to that of the novel, Mankurtstan. Takezhan is an alternative Russian-speaking rapper of Kazakh origin which puts him into the category of being a hybrid cultural producer. He raps in Russian but about very local Kazakhstani themes. His narration in the rap song is about the 2030 and 2050 times – the period of prosperity in Kazakhstan as it outlined by the regime in the long-term ‘Kazakhstan 2030’ and ‘Kazakhstan 2050’ development programmes. Instead of talking about a projected ‘bright future’, Takezhan talks from the position of his imaginary grand-daughter who dies from hunger and blames him for ‘doing nothing’ when he had opportunities to save her generation in the 2000s. She asks him why did he and his generation allow authoritarianism to grow and destroy Kazakhstan as a country and as a nation – selling its territory, natural resources, polluting and destroying its ecology and destroying its culture (source: the video is available at this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNE1sZu8M5g).

The idea of ‘authenticity’ – the power to define the ultimate truth that antagonized the state that was losing its ultimate power in producing its own ‘truth’ through propaganda allowed these new cultural producers to succeed. This was partially achieved due to the state’s own failures to change its rigid approaches. But after the collapse of the old Soviet state, artists realized that they still had to revolt and resist against old paradigms and a rigidity of cultural production frameworks that remained in the form of Soviet institutional and ideological legacy:

We are still victims of these post-totalitarian legacies, we still have the roots from the old [Soviet] times. We think why should we cling to this [lifestyle and status quo] like the older generation did, we need to change the country, we need to make this country and bravely go ahead, develop ourselves more and leave Russia’s orbit of influence. ¹⁰

The revolt against the Soviet state turned into the revolt against the Soviet legacy and towards the formation of the new type of a proactive and cosmopolitan society (rather than strictly ethnically divided one). And if the revolt against the Soviet state and its post-effects: the need to build a new state and new nation in the 1990s led to the cultural paradigms of nationalistic narratives in art, then the problems of the 2000s – namely the identity crisis and division of Kazakhstani society led to the formation of political art. In political art, nationalistic narratives still focus on the idea of defining the national character but it also shifts artists towards artistically defining the political agenda of building a unified civil society and a strong community of proactive citizens. Let me consider two examples of such trends.

Said Atabekov’s recent art work, We are from Shymkent, are series of black and white photographs of Kokpar (also known as Buzkashi) traditional horse-mounting game, similar to polo where players try to grab the dead goat. Kokpar in Atabekov’s works plays an important role. First, it is depicted as a purely male game that requires great physical preparation. Atabekov’s photos depict Kazakh middle-aged male. Second, Kokpar is a traditional nomadic game but by depicting the real and modern practice of Kokpar where men are dressed up in cheap Chinese outfits, counterfeits of famous brands such as Adidas, Dolce&Gabbana and so on, Atabekov challenges both the authenticity of contemporary practice that sells itself as ‘traditional’ but also challenges the notion of globalization of Kazakh traditions. Finally, Atabekov challenges the official narratives of spectacular sports and celebrations. Kokpar is usually played and displayed during the official national celebrations of Nauryz, Peoples’ Friendship Day or during official sports competitions. ‘We are from Shymkent’ is disseminated online – in a group on Atabekov’s Facebook account challenging the whole Kazakhstani art field by ridiculing and denying the practice of exhibitions and making art widely available and free of charge to a wide audience. We are from Shymkent is also a dramatic depiction of the ‘imagined geographies’ expressed through the depiction of the land but also the bodies of the men whom Atabekov focuses on. One of the men is wearing a coat with the ‘Border Control’ label on it alluding to Atabekov’s own understanding of borders, spatialities and mobilities that the artist himself perceives as flexible, fluid and in constant motion. ¹¹

Menlibayeva’s (2015) Kurchatov-22 video art dedicated to Soviet nuclear testing in Eastern Kazakhstan followed by a new work on the same theme but in a different location – in Semipalatinsk. The video follows a young woman who runs away from an unknown deserted area. Menlibayeva vividly depicts the deserted area of the former testing polygon with its ramshackle surroundings and half-destroyed buildings and abandoned houses. This is not the first time when Menlibayeva has depicted Kazakhstan’s ecological problems. One of her best-known work Transoxania Dreams is situated in the desserts of Aral Sea – a Soviet-created ecological catastrophe. The depiction of the destructed nomadic traditional way of living is central to Menlibayeva’s work and her re-consideration of the ‘authentic’ that she feels like she and Kazakhstan had lost.

These examples demonstrate how contemporary artists try to propose alternative views to the state-sponsored agenda of traditions and nation in Kazakhstan.

Conclusion: neo-linkages of punk Shamanism

The post-Soviet political, economic, social and most importantly cultural transformations dramatically influenced the development of cultural production in independent, post-Soviet states such as Kazakhstan. The dismantling of the old authoritative system bared inconsistencies of the postcolonial society and totalitarian ideology of the Soviet regime and controlled ethnic codification. The old forms of cultural productions, some of which were produced in secret, semi-dissenting fashion gave ways to the development of new forms and self-expressions. The case of punk shamanism can be identified as a peculiar postcolonial cultural experiment which hybridizes the recent past under the controlled authoritative system yet denies the official ideology of the new independent state. It is used as both ridicule and artistic critique of the ‘post-’ ideological vacuum or post-Soviet pastiche as many artists clearly associate the immediate independence projects-in-the-making with the empty inertia of the Soviet cultural production. Punk shamanism is also used as a continuous search for lost memory and re-imagining the new geographies and spatialities in the meaningful search for defining the true ‘national’ character.

Almagul Menlibayeva, who coined this concept, recently re-wrote her artistic statement within the core of punk shamanism’s idea:

I use specific ways of expression in modern and contemporary art as a vehicle to investigate my personal archaic atavism as a certain mystical anthropomorphism. In other words, I explore the nature of a specific Egregore, a shared cultural psychic experience, which manifests itself as a specific thought-form among the people(s) of the ancient, arid and dusty Steppes between the Caspian Sea, Baikonur and Altai in today’s Kazakhstan. In the Russian language, Archaic Atavism is personalized as a being, which points to and creates a different meaning. […] It is as if he has been awakened by the post-Soviet experience of the indigenous Kazakh people, who are becoming their own after 80 years of Soviet domination and cultural genocide. Suddenly he (Archaic Atavism) became interested in enculturation and in behavioral modernity. He also began to have entertaining dialogues with the transnational circulation of ideas in contemporary art. For this dialogue, I have chosen the medium of video and photography and like to work with the notion of memory and reality. My archaic atavism is interested in my video explorations in the Steppes and in post-Soviet Asia. By editing raw data and combining documentary and staged footage, I become his voice, enabling a cultural eхоdus from long oblivion. My work raises metaphysical questions such as Who am I? and Where shall I go?; this (psychic) experience and perspective marks my artistic language. ¹²

This metaphysical language of search and de-amnesia of punk shamanism has guided not only Menlibayeva and her close friends and colleagues from the Green Triangle group but also other artists who work on exactly the same themes of memory loss, heritage, lost nomadic roots, imagined geographies and knowledge simultaneously. The agenda of the independent contemporary artists remains the same despite their educational, class, urban or ethnic divide. This shift has been informed by the challenges of individual and collective perception of post-Sovietness and post-ideology in contemporary Kazakhstan.