Kazakhstan Pavilion at 2024 Venice Biennale

Jerūiyq is a promised land from Kazakh legend, passed down to the present through generations of oral tradition, serving as a metaphor for searching, exploration, improvement, and invisible knowledge. Ancient tales about the philosopher Asan Kaigy tell of his efforts to lead the nomadic people to lands free from disease and hunger, where time grants eternal life. The word “kaigy” translates from Kazakh as “sorrow.” Common expressions such as “fall into asan kaigy” use this name as a synonym for sorrow. Sorrow, like a thin veil, hangs over the memory of the many utopias that have failed to be realized in the endless steppe, through traumatic encounters with the dark side of modernity: the tragic famine of the 1930s, craters carved out by nuclear test sites in Semey, the desiccation of the Aral Sea, and other scars on the body of the Kazakh land. The exhibition is based on a chronology of key artworks of the utopian imagination of Kazakh artists since the 1970s (“Above the White Desert” — K. Mulashov), through the works of the period of the emergence of contemporary art in Kazakhstan (“Baikonur-2” by S. Maslov) to the present day — including works based on artificial intelligence (“Presence” — Lena Pozdanykova and Eldar Tagi).