(Kuangaliyeva)
Everything is already lost, and therefore safe
Archival exposition as a part of Cauchemar Edition 1.
2025
This exhibitional project was developed in curatorial collaboration with Aiman Kulzhanova and Zhanarbek Amankulov.
Photodocumentation:
Roman Sozonov
Atelier Cauchemar
I believe it is essential for an artist to work with their own archive, even though this process is often painful and fraught with the risk of disappointment in oneself. Yet precisely this act of faith grants the artist a necessary sensitivity and resolve. It is a state in which I rediscover new meanings and reimagine those that have lost their density within my work. I risk never fully knowing how the changes within me echo through what was created nine, five, or two years ago, yet they form a safe ground that frees me from the trauma of exhibiting. It is both a physical and mental effort that makes my artistic path denser, fuller, and more sincere, but above all, freer. These are my memories of childhood and of walks along the shoreline, which today have become testimonies of coastal lines that have changed beyond recognition over the past decade. This is the eternity of the Ustyurt Plateau, a space whose transformation I hope never to witness in my lifetime. Reflecting on the traces of chemical tests and vanished waters, I begin to notice in my photographs steppes and valleys that have taken on the shapes of waves, and lines of water horizons that disappeared millennia ago.
These are photographic notes from my long struggle with a mental disorder. In 2017 they became an instrument I would later, in 2021, describe as a device for devouring inner chaos. In this series, the rustling of trees becomes for me a symbol of choosing life, where time tangles in the leaves. If you watch the foliage on windless days long enough, you can see how time slows down, and the weight of ceaseless thoughts gives way to the quiet whispering of branches. I find similar states in the sounds and lines of water and horizons.
The Great Atomic Bombreflector Manifesto
Video, 2024 | 8 min
Video documentation of a live performance of The Great Atomic Bombreflector Manifesto by Sabina Quangali, performed for a single spectator.
Based on the invention of the last Kazakh avant-garde artist and Genius of Absolute Interplanetary Category, Sergey Kalmykov.
Performed for a single spectator, the work places the encounter at its most intimate — one body, one gaze, one confrontation with myth, memory, and cosmic reflection. Suffering, loss, and the invisible forces of history are not observed from a distance but met directly.
The work transforms violence into generative energy, expanding perception toward the moral, sensory, and spiritual dimensions of chaos.
For this performance, the artist invented a device-cinema.
Text and video: Sabina Quangali Performer: Sabina Quangali
Genion and the 4th Dimension. The Theory of the New Genius.
2018–2024
Artistic research developed within ORTA Collective: black and white film photography, 3D modeling, documentary photography, Spectacular Experiments, environmental scanning ~270 photographs, 35 3D models.
Through documentary photography, 3D modeling, and experimental practices of scanning and transferring environments between the 3rd and 4th dimension, the artist produces the first visually documented Genions made available to our seeing apparatus. The methodology of discovery is itself an artistic and philosophical experiment, examining different approaches to observing reality and its perception through systematic archiving, photographing, and scanning.
Preparation for data acquisition follows a specific proportion: developing film, reading Sergey Kalmykov's texts, performing Spectacular Experiments, and radically expanding observational practices.
Seven years of complex artistic and philosophical research, conducted both in solitude and collectively, made this possible. The most compatible medium for presenting this data has been black and white film photography and 3D modeling. To date, the artist has assembled around 270 images and 35 3D models of Genions.
This artistic research is grounded in the texts and inventions of Sergey Kalmykov, and the collective work of ORTA Collective from 2018 to 2024.
LAI–PI–CHU–PLEE–LAPA. Centre for the New Genius
2022
Transdisciplinary installation, research centre Kazakhstan's inaugural national pavilion, 59th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy
Commissioner: Meruyert Kaliyeva Curator/Exhibitor: ORTA Collective (Alexandra Morozova, Rusten Begenov, Darya Jumelya, Alexander Bakanov, Sabina Kuangaliyeva)
Photography:
Darya Jumelya
Scans;
Zhanna Ee
Suicide notes
2017–2022 Ongoing photographic practice: analog and digital photography
Exhibition: Here, There, Nowhere — Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture, 2021
Photography: Zhanarbek Amankulov / Atelier Cauchemar
Within this practice, I observe myself across different places and inner states: on the shore of the Caspian Sea, on Olkhon Island, on a bus traveling toward Mongolia, sitting on the terrace of my parents' home, in North Africa, listening to music and closely attending to the flow of my own thoughts. The camera becomes a tool for registering not events, but internal shifts, an attempt to stabilize attention, ground myself, and remain in contact with reality.
The series began in 2017 out of a need to archive these states. At the time, I lacked the capacity to write critical texts or keep written records, and photography became the only possible form of documentation. Over time, this gesture evolved into an ongoing practice. In 2022, the series was paused following an improvement in my condition. Looking back, I see this work as having provided me with an optical framework, a way to exist and work within different states without suppressing or romanticizing them, but through careful, sustained observation.
This practice marked the beginning of my critical reflection on photography and time, later articulated in my 2025 essay Everything Is Lost and Therefore Safe.
Futurostan
2017–2021 VR game, interactive installation
Group exhibitions:
First Contact, Palace of Independence, Astana, Kazakhstan, 2019
Time & Astana, National Museum, Astana, Kazakhstan, 2017 A Zen-extravaganza
'The First Atomic Bombreflector', Meyerhold Center, A special theatrical and exhibition project for NONAME-2021 Decolonial Festival, 2021
The project draws from Martin Heidegger's concept of Dasein, developed in Being and Time (1927): human existence is always being-in-the-world, incomplete and open, always ahead of itself. Three Heideggerian concepts become the structure of the space itself.
Thrownness (Geworfenheit): we find ourselves already placed in a world we did not choose. Astana is a city that emerged from ideological will, not lived necessity. The player arrives in it just as suddenly and without alternative. Fallenness (Verfallenheit): the tendency to dissolve into the public, constructed world rather than confront one's own existence. The city absorbs you into its logic. The game environment is intentionally sparse and non-linear, with no winning or losing, only wandering. The "Not-Yet": existence is always incomplete, always oriented toward a possibility that has not yet arrived. This is what the endless steppe and the bare render of the game in its earliest stage embody. At the core of the work is the idea that the matrix builds itself under the feet of the one who walks. Just as the ground beneath a character renders at the moment of each step, the world unfolds through action, through movement itself. The simulation's stability lies not in its detail but in its open-ended potential.
The title of this work references Mikhail Akulov, "Eternal Futurostan: Myths, Fantasies and the Making of Astana in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan," in Theorizing Central Asian Politics, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Futurostan. Triptych.
2021 In-game photography, triptych
The title references Mikhail Akulov, "Eternal Futurostan: Myths, Fantasies and the Making of Astana in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan," in Theorizing Central Asian Politics, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Grey zone
2017 Documentary photography Baiqonyr, Kazakhstan / International Space Station
The history of the general administrative unit, the point of genuine interaction between the human and the cosmos, becomes a political reflection of this phenomenon. Founded 60 years ago, the city was immediately alienated from the outside world, receiving the status of a regime object of the smoldering Soviet state. Its disintegration and the inability of the new owner to support the work of the project made the search for a long-term tenant inevitable. The deal determined the approximate service life of the settlement, launching the process of splitting its identity.
The exhaustion of Soviet resources, imposed on the wounds of the oil curse, turned out to be a scientific potential loss for the tenant. Despite economic degradation, his political ambitions and corruption psychopathy created a demand for his own space project. For all the improbability of the plan, speculation about it commenced a storm of domestic quarrels with the owner. The prospect of future responsibility for the city plunged him into despair, while the owner himself was approaching material disaster. The conflict that demanded compromise and equal participation of both countries ended in mutual denial of belonging.
Martin Heidegger considered the constant reflection of presence in the world to be an integral feature of a conscious being. Being admitted to a certain time and place, they feel an irresistible need to seek the foundation for life. Thus, the whole period of a lifetime is devoted to researching the possibilities of the environment. Feelings of fear and anguish in this search become evidence of the existence of the subject, as well as of their consciousness. The absolute triumph of life is achieved when the subject accepts all the uncertainty of the freedom of being, making a conscious choice in favor of action.
The autocratic indifference of the administration and the deterioration of the city's infrastructure force the population to spontaneously leave their homes. Remaining citizens, numb from the repressed spirit, reconcile themselves with a future liberation. Humility is not a sensible acceptance of freedom, but the doom of it. This freedom only accelerates the disintegration of life. In it, the search for reasons of being is replaced by a deliberate immersion in feebleness. The unity of society is replaced by fragmentation, participation by passive detachment, action by aspiration for decline.
Heidegger tries to answer the question of what it means to be a separate being in the world. The current conditions require a different emphasis: what for and why be a separate entity? How to endure the inevitability of freedom? Where to look for reasons to feel separation?
This text was written by Dmitrii Mazorenko, edited and translated by Sabina Quangali