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Erbossyn Meldibekov: The Point Becomes a Circle, and Time Turns into a Ball in a Curved Space
8 February - 8 March
FreeEVENT DESCRIPTION
Few artists have kept their finger on the pulse of the layered cultural, artistic and sociohistorical landscape of Central Asia as firmly as Erbossyn Meldibekov (b. 1964), who has been making works that serve as metaphors for the ever shifting geopolitics of the region since the early 1990s.
The Point Becomes a Circle, and Time Turns into a Ball in a Curved Space, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition at Rossi & Rossi Hong Kong, will take place on the 8th of February 2025, showcasing a brand new body of works from the past five years. In them, Meldibekov returns to the visual foundations of his oeuvre, namely the point and the circle, as symbols to expound the art history and its contemporary discourse of the steppes in his native Kazakhstan.
ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER
Erbossyn Meldibekov was born in 1964 in Shymkent, Kazakhstan, and he currently lives and works in Almaty. His practice is informed and influenced by the so-called ‘collapse of culture’ in Central Asia, where rivalling tribes in his native Kazakhstan have fought over the distribution of power and wealth, which has resulted in political and social disarray.
Through this lens, the artist examines the collapse of civility in a post-Soviet space as well as the struggle to create national identities in Central Asia’s newly founded statehoods. Drawing on the region’s epic historical past, which includes conquests that have accumulated a sea of ‘heroic’ monuments throughout the region, many of his works reference ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Meldibekov deploys his ideas via a range of diverse mediums, such as video, painting, performance, sculpture and installation. This array offers viewers absurd, heroic and often humorous visual interpretations of the shifts and turns of historical events. His works, in turn, delve into the implications of these events on the human psyche in addition to the collective efforts to resist and subvert the proxy power play that has been plaguing the region since the disintegration of the former USSR.
The artist graduated from the Almaty Theatre and Fine Arts Institute in 1992. He has since exhibited internationally, with recent shows including YOU ARE HERE. Central Asia, Fondazione Elpis, Milan, Italy (2024); the 3rd Xinjiang Biennale, China (2023); The Fog of War, Goethe-Institut Kasachstan, Almaty, Kazakhstan (2023); and Transformer, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia (2020), amongst others. He also participated in the 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT7), Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia (2012), and the 51st Venice Biennale, where he contributed to the inaugural Central Asia Pavilion (2005).
