The art of the Sixtiers in Soviet Kazakhstan, or how to make a portrait from a skull

Abstract

ABSTRACT The artists of the Sixtiers generation in Soviet Kazakhstan have typically been understood as the creators of an authentic Kazakh style. This article demonstrates that a web of constructed vectors helped consolidate art as ‘Kazakh’ in the 1960s and early 1970s. I argue that the Sixtiers mined the history of nomadic populations in Central Asia for site-specific cultural forms as a means to connect with an expanding art world and the global context of decolonialization. Neither wholly official nor countercultural, the Sixtiers produced a cultural milieu that stretched the limits of the sayable in late Soviet socialism and defined the margins of modernity with which Kazakh artists continue to contend.