Quraq in the Contemporary Art of Central Asia: Symbolic Language and Artistic Text

Abstract

A piece of fabric and products, made from it, are called quraq by the Kazakhs, in the past and now it occupy a special place in the cultural practice of the peoples of Central Asia; and today its renaissance is taking place in modern art both as an image itself and as an artistic device. This is due to its wide expressive technical and artistic, semantic and communicative capabilities. In general, authors of the article understand the term of quraq as the traditional patchwork technique as such and the whole variety of products made with this technique. The analysis of modern works of art from the point of view of semiotics showed that a piece of fabric (as a sign and as a symbol) is able to demonstrate various ways of encoding ethnocultural information. The main methodological tool of this study is the semiotic approach, where a piece of fabric is considered at the level of semantics as a sign of the symbolic language, and from the standpoint of pragmatics as a text representing relationship between the sign (a piece of fabric) and those who use it (an artist, a viewer). The study also uses general scientific methods of observation, comparison, analysis and synthesis. It seems that this approach is relevant in a study of modern visual art. Based on the semiotic approach and the artistic experience of contemporary artists of Central Asia, this study aims to demonstrate new vectors of Kazakh cultural studies and art criticism. Concerning the materials used in this article, they come from a variety of sources: the field research carried out by the Russian Ethnographic Museum during the period from 2019 to 2021, a number of regional studies museums in Kazakhstan, as well as online collections of the Central Asian region presented at the International Quilt Museum (Nebraska, USA). The article has been prepared within the project of the Ministry of Higher Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan AR09259280 Languages of Kazakh Culture as the Basis of Ethnic Identity: Semiotics and Semantics.