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CULTURE AS A TEXT AND A PROJECT IN THE POST-SOVIET DISCOURSE (BY THE EXAMPLE OF KAZAKHSTAN) // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2023. Issue 1 (35). P. 30-47

The article presents an analysis of the semiotic aspects of significant texts and visual samples in the discursive art practice of post-Soviet Kazakhstan from the 1990s to nowadays. Literary centricity as a universal property of the entire post-Soviet visual culture is revealed on the previously unstudied material, which has intermedial and intertextual specifics. Art discourse is analyzed on the thematic and rhetorical levels, using verifiable scientific methods for these levels (content analysis, critical discourse analysis, the deconstruction method). As a result, the art objects of post-Soviet Kazakhstan, with the texts included in them, are analyzed in the article in the local historical and political context. Three projects were identified: Eurasian, Pan-Turkic, and liberal. As given intertexts, they determined the social and cultural boundaries and assessments of Kazakhstani artists. The projects, as written and proved in the article, had their historical foundations and still determine the real policy. The art ideas which appeared within the framework of these projects find a modern medial reflection. The work, for the first time in the scientific literature, proves that medial experiments in the practice of Kazakhstani contemporary art (texts and performances by Sergei Maslov, Ziyakhan Shaigeldinov (Shai-Ziya), Yerbol Meldibekov, Elena and Viktor Vorobyov, as well as modern actionists) documented the process of what is happening, reflected the traumatic nature of reality itself. For the first and only time in the public space of the country, as the article shows, by means of art practice, these experiments have criticized the quasi-real world of Kazakhstan's social and cultural space. In the Kazakh contemporary art itself, there have always been a lot of texts and subtexts, which are often directly included in art objects or have created them. The article traces that these were such text samples that generated their own meaning along with a visual idea at a given point in time, which can be called the creation of discourse. The work also reveals that representatives of contemporary Kazakh art used the aesthetics of the absurd as a mechanism for transforming post-Soviet everyday life into a different and new reality, similar to how it happened in absurdist fiction of the twentieth century. At the same time, visual samples in Kazakhstani practice of the late 20th and early 21st centuries became real cultural aggregators, they replaced the written text and influenced its functioning in culture. The article reveals the still practically unexplored usage of the aesthetics of television intermediality in Kazakhstani contemporary art. Art projects and manifestos of Kazakh artists of the 1990s and the 2000s are presented as unique socio-political discursive texts that predicted the specific socio-political realities of the post-Soviet country.

Keywords: art project, discursive practice, literary centricity, intermedial, intertextual, cultural text, performance, post-Soviet, aesthetics of absurd