AIGANA GALI IN CONVERSATION WITH NICO KOS EARLE
’Just like the ocean, the steppe is a vast horizon of “nothing” that holds much magic inside.’
Aigana Gali
There are some places, certain underpasses, verges or gaps in the built environment that are completely overlooked. Empty, hazy spaces between the carved up, portioned out cityscape that seem to have no value, belong to no-one. To get to Aigana Gali’s studio you have to pass through one of these disquieting zones in central London. Down a side passageway, through an uncomfortably low parking lot where irregular concrete pillars are gashed with car paint, and on into the underbelly of a high-rise; its uniform grid of characterless rooms yawing up into an overcast sky. Underneath this behemoth, through a yellowed door time marked with finger prints, is a humble, windowless room, lit from above by a bare strip of LED light. The floor, carpeted so long ago every fibre has sunk and welded to the cement beneath, is now a brownish layer of sediment. There is no furniture other than a large centrally positioned formica table and a single chair… and yet entering this room is as mind altering as being in a foreign land.
The first time I followed the artist Aigana into her “studio cave”, something on the back of her long flowing, cloak - inside a hand painted symbol of an eye - winked at me. As the door swung open, I paused on the threshold, overcome with a kind of vertigo. I seemed to be looking out at something vast, like the window of a plane as it breaks through the clouds into the full beams of a new dawn; sunlight bouncing along a candy floss sea. Lining the walls were variously proportioned large and medium canvas shimmering in washes of delicate, luminous colour. At first glance, one might say colour fields (and the artists they call to mind are relevant to our discussion), but there is nothing explicitly geographic or landed about them. They are auric, mysterious and engulf you in a kind of pigment storm, one that embodies the mutable, almost indescribable interplay of light and dust of the wide open desert. Like mirages, these paintings transport the mind, and trigger the emotions in unpredictable ways.
“Kazakhstan is dominated by vast barren lands of the Central Asian steppe. Just like the ocean, it is a vast horizon of “nothing” that holds much magic inside. My Steppe paintings describe the ever changing theatre of light and colour found in these wide open, empty spaces.”
Windows into another world - part real, part metaphysical - these works articulate the wild, untethered spirit of Aigana’s homeland; the fundamental, irrepressible nature of the Eurasian Steppe. And yet, she makes them in a sort of cave, inside an unremarkable building at the lower end of Kensington. Contrast: from within this difficult, condensed urban space the artist conjures works that speak of wide open, light filled vistas where the spirit roams free, uninhibited. Here is the pale light of dawn against the soft departure of night (Altyn Orda); there the throb of infrared (Nadir); and flooding a large square canvas is a vivid lake of ultramarine (Aral). Totally strange and yet strangely familiar, we recover the forgotten dream of an ancient, waterless sea.
Aigana’s ability to channel the essence of the steppe, is at once skilful and shamanic; to say she is highly trained is an understatement by western standards. Her arts education is as long and complicated as Kazakhstan’s relationship with Russia, and ultimately her talent is a testament to the assimilation of both or, more specifically, a conscious decision to take the best from both sides. “I had to train my hands so that I could forget about them, so that I am not distracted by them. Now when I work, my process is so free, my hands can just follow the movement, and I have this capacity to give form to what I feel - something I can rely on.” Born in Kazakhstan, much of Aigana’s childhood was spent developing her physical and artistic talents. Intense periods of training (ballet, theatre, fine art) were punctuated by moments of respite, found when driving out of the city with her family into the steppe, “every weekend we would go to nature”. Long limbed and lithe, everything about this artist is fine tuned, her sleek black hair is centrally parted and swept back into a low bun, giving arched form to the feline shape of her dark brown eyes, delicate brows and high cheekbones. Her gaze is steady and unflinching; when she is looking at you there is a sense her pupils have expanded supernaturally and she can see right through you.
“When you correlate your life with such huge empty spaces you see things differently. In a small settlement you see the world reduced and the self as big and important; but there in the steppe it is clear you are nothing. When you live from that point, it gives you a very different way of thinking, you live on no one’s land, nothing belongs to you and you don’t have the same attachment to things.”
Until she was ten years old, Kazakhstan was a part of the Soviet Union, so “all our religious and philosophical heritage was cancelled. We were not allowed to follow our own or any religion… so my sense of the culture in the steppe feels inherited, carried in my DNA. I just knew it was there.” Originally inhabited by nomadic Scythians, Turkic nomads have occupied the country throughout its history. Once subjugated by the Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan, by the 16th century the Kazakhs emerged as a distinct group, divided into three jüz. "Kazakhstan was named by the Soviets, who wanted to take possession of her destiny.” In response, there was an explosion of the avant-garde, “a culture that happened in hidden, windowless places, where the artist had to hide both the self and their artistic expression.”
It is between these two things that the artist had to find her voice.
“During the Soviet era the most incredible art was made; at first there was the Russian avant-garde, then during the perestroika of the 1980s, a new wave of young Kazakh filmmakers emerged. My hero was Victor Tsoi, a true icon of the post Soviet generation who died tragically in his 30s. ” Whilst the film industry in Kazakhstan was created by the Soviets, what they learnt also prepared them to challenge the cinematic establishment. Released in 1988, The Needle provided a catalyst for this new movement in Kazakh film. Directed by Rashid Nugmanov, Viktor Tsoi the frontman of the popular Soviet rock group Kino, was cast as the central figure. Considered by many to be a hero to the disaffected Soviet youth, “we understood that standing strong against something also gave you clarity of intention… and it happened in caves, with artists hiding what they were making, and who they were, because you were not allowed to create things that did not reflect the idea the union had of itself.”
In The Needle's denouement Tsoi’s character - who also composed the film score - returns to the city and discovers his ex-girlfriend has a heroin addiction. Wanting to save her, he takes her away “to the most forsaken place on the planet, the Aral Sea, now a salt desert, empty and dead. Watching this scene requires no commentary about how devastating human interaction with nature can be.”
If you see Aigana’s painting Aral it is quite the opposite. Saturated with brilliant ultramarine hues, the work is alive with the freshness of circulating water; it celebrates a health giving shift in both the actual place, parts of which are now being restored after decades of degradation, and in the artist’s relationship with her country - and keys us into a contemporaneous awareness of ecological issues. Abstracted thus, we can appreciate a purity in her relationship to the land, behind which is an abiding sense that the steppe belongs to those who look after it. It is a perspective that is at once liberating and engenders a deep sense of responsibility. In some ways, these works present a philosophical overview; they encourage a shift in perspective, a standing back to see the true essence of things, beyond border politics.
“In 2015 I took 40 paintings of Steppe I took back to Tbilisi, Georgia, to the National Museum for a solo exhibition. I opened my talk by saying that my mother was exiled to Kazakhstan and my whole family suffered for it, but I love this country and my land. I am a true child of the Georgian mountains and the Kazakh steppe and I am bringing my Steppe back to Georgia. That was a very symbolic moment, it showed me that art is very much beyond politics - it will find a way to blossom, no matter how hard.”
Aigana’s mother is Georgian, and her father is Kazakh, a cultural duality that was compounded by Kazakhstan’s nuanced, complicated history with Russia. In some ways this might explain the artist's natural ability to transcend cultural boundaries, but what sets her apart is an awareness of what each gave her, and an understanding of what she needed to leave behind. Following the 1917 Russian Revolution, and subsequent civil war, the territory of Kazakhstan was reorganised several times. In 1936, it was made the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, part of the Soviet Union. Kazakhstan was the last of the Soviet republics to declare independence during the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Whilst she went through the numerous educational systems, she did not become a product of any, but took what she needed, and respectfully appreciates the many ways it benefited her.
“When I did my masters degree, my thesis was on “The Influence of Russian Academic school of Painting to Kazakh School”, but the fact is a Kazakh school never existed because we were a shamanic tribe, the symbols we painted (on cloaks) we not for fine art but part of our folk tradition. Then I learnt about Aiganem - the wife of the tribal leader Wali - who invited painters from Russia to teach her children and grandchildren. So in a way, she was the root of Kazakh fine art, and I was given her name.
“I am product of a collaboration: the importation of a very strict Soviet academic school and a living folk tradition. I can travel from one technique to the next, as my hands are so well practiced, but the root of my practice lies underneath this in the Scythian tradition - in shamanic ritual.”
Historically inhabited by nomads, the name "Kazakh" comes from the ancient Turkic word qaz, "to wander", and the Persian suffix -stan means "land" or "place of", so Kazakhstan can be literally translated as "land of the wanderers”. It was in looking back at Kazakhstan’s peripatetic history that Aigana found a way forwards, and began to express the essential, transient nature of the steppe through the universal language of paint. Which brings us to that moment of wonder, in a nameless studio cave somewhere hidden in London. Just as Turgenev showed us in his short story The Singers, those who truly embody or express the spirit of a place transcend its limits and become emblems of their culture for a wider audience. These paintings pulse with the artist’s love for and lived experience of her land, and skilfully capture the immensity of these emotions so that we can glimpse them too.
“Kazakhstan is a very unusual place, it can be very inhospitable (-40 in winter and +40 in the summer) and so most of the political prisoners were sent there, including my mother’s family from Georgia. Then a Nuclear polygon was sited the middle of our country, and the Aral Sea was drained almost entirely for agricultural and mining purposes. Despite this, there remains a remarkable harmony and resilience in the people there.”
It is worth keeping this in mind when considering the place from which the artist currently choses to work. The contrast between what she makes and where she makes it is stark, and belies a need to confront or overcome difficulty in solitude and through darkness. Perhaps this is what prompted Aigana’s move to London in 2005, just as she was gaining recognition at home.
“Before I moved to London, I found myself in a vacuum in Kazakhstan. Having made a film, I lost my anonymity; when I went out, I was recognised, and I found this too distracting. So I hid away in my studio and just worked all the time. When you are recognised by people, they give you masks to wear and project onto you what they want you to be… It highlighted what was happening to my land, how my country was changing, and I did not want this to enter my space. I now understand that’s why Georgia O’Keefe ran away.”
Aigana understood this was the moment to leave, to begin again, somewhere foreign and complex “where I was nobody, unrecognisable, silent”. During her first year in London, Aigana taught herself English on visits alone to the museums, listening to audio guides “trying to understand, writing down the words I did not know” whilst also painting in a rented studio. Over 12 months she completed a series of about 40 paintings entitled LEDA. “This series loosely depicts a personal story, but it probably represents the end of my personal message in painting. “ It was then that Aigana started to feel intensely homesick.
“I was missing my land, but what I was missing most of all was the sun, and sunlight. From that moment, I knew I had to depict this empty space - and then I realised something very basic: if not for the sun, my paintings (the whole world we see and colour) would not exist. If we switched off the light of the sun, my paintings would be grey - black and white - I understood that all this time I was depicting the sunlight. This huge projector, it casts our lives on the walls of the cave… It is only through reflection that we can see the true nature of the sun.”
In this departure from the familiar to the strange, we return to the metaphor of the studio as a cave, and the artist’s fundamental need to find a safe, quiet space to work without any distraction. “I can work anywhere as long as there is space and materials, but only if Tengri - or however you like to understand the energy of the universe - is channelling through me.” Tengri, is an ancient form of spirituality found in the steppe, based on folk shamanism, generally centred around the titular sky god. The name Tengri ("the Sky") is derived from Old Turkic: Tenk ("daybreak") or Tan (“dawn”). Referencing the sky and light, its followers often worshiped in caves, outlining its cosmology on the walls. “The meaning of life for followers of the Tengri is to be at one with nature, and in this we are sustained by both the spirits of heaven and earth: the eternal blue sky and the warm yellow mother beneath our feet.”
In one Turkuc myth, Tengri is a pure, white goose that flies constantly over an endless expanse of water, which represents time. Beneath this water, Ak Ana ("White Mother") calls out to him saying "Create". To overcome his loneliness, Tengri creates Er Kishi, who is not as pure or as white as Tengri and together they set up the world. It is a myth that keys us into the moment Aigana started this series.
“In my dream, I came into a room and I saw huge, empty canvas with only sunlight on them and nothing else, it was very vivid and so colourful. In this dream I said to myself - ‘how I envy the artist who could depict this, how I would love to try and do the same.’ When I woke up, I still felt the envy I had in my dream for this artist - then I realised that it was me.”
Through the act of painting she began to bring her feelings for the steppe to life - not just for herself - but for those who have been there, and for people like me, who have never seen the steppe before. Painting these from memory, or rather a “remembered feeling of a memory”, to access this, she first had to take herself away, putting time and distance between the place that shaped her. So deprived, she began to recall the steppe, and then, within the safety of her studio, she allowed herself to feel the true nature of this nostalgia.
Aigana uses titles to amplify the significance of the indigenous stories and geographical locations embedded in this series: Kaindy refers to a milky turquoise lake, formed when the ice melted, to reveal petrified silver birch ; in spring, Djida blossoms infuse the steppe with the scent of honey and wood; and Ainalaiyn refers to a mysterious shamanic ritual that dates back to pre-Islamic times. “We know these stories, but the culture of the desert is silent, so they circulate only in whispers and live in our imaginations.” The Steppe paintings strip away modern-day political discourse, superfluous human constructions, disparities between noisy and bustling cities and isolated villages, and re-centre the narrative on a core element that has survived through time: the Kazakh steppe. Historically the domain of tribal nomads, the steppe is rich with hidden treasures, in particular gold elements from the Saka that proliferate the earth in sunken burial grounds. Only visible to the trained eye, these paintings capture Aigana’s reverence for the steppe’s forgotten nomads and mysterious past. They open up a window in the mind: we are transported to the desert, immersed in a phenomenological theatre of light.
“What struck me about living in the steppe was the vastness. So much negative space and nothingness, yet, paradoxically, it had enough of everything for me. I am a very visual person, and there the light and colours are constantly changing. I thought to myself ‘this is your challenge - if you call yourself an artist, then try to depict this ever changing picture.’ I wanted to make a painting with this nothing so full of life, light and colour.”
Dreamlike abstractions - sensational but undecipherable - her works call to mind the great colour field paintings of Mark Rothko, or J.M.W. Turner’s epic skies; paintings created after intense periods of observation, in recollection, by masterful colourists. Although the Steppe originated somewhere very different, these paintings explore the universal power of colour and its capacity to awaken our connection to the spiritual - like watching the sunrise. Just as Mark Rothko saw his art as a spiritual process, and openly proclaimed his art to have a spiritual meaning, Aigana frequently references this aspect of her work.
“People often tell me ‘you have painted heaven’, but what is heaven? It is somewhere we cannot be, but only imagine. When we do, we think of harmonious colours that soothe us. Each painting has whole palette of colour - cold, warm, dark light, and by veiling them you make one colour raise sound of another - within each canvas you have everything - but overall the mood is set.”
This reference to heaven points to the spiritual effect of these works on both the artist and viewer. By immersing herself in the natural beauty of the steppe, Aigana began to engage with the ancient religion of Tengri, in which colours are seen as symbolic of the natural order of things. With each work, we are invited into a meditation on the many ways we see and experience colour: how it affects our relationship to the world and tunes our emotions.
“Tengri see colours as symbolic of a natural order. Kok, which describes all the blues and greens means ‘god given’. Tengri itself is ‘a great-blue sky'. Sary describes all the earthly colours from yellow through red and brown. Umay is the female manifestation of Tengri, coming from earth which is Sary (yellow). So when we are alive our body is from the earth and our soul from the sky and when we die, each returns to its place, and our circle is complete.”
How we see colour depends on where we have come from, where we grew up, and what cultural associations it sparks in our mind. As Wassily Kandinsky once wrote, “Those [things] that we encounter for the first time immediately have a spiritual effect upon us.” Aigana approaches the spiritual through colour: just as the sun brings the steppe to life, its light animates these paintings; they capture something essential about the underlying structure of things. As with all of Aigana’s work, the process and materials used in painting the Steppe have a relationship with the philosophy that underpins them.
‘Everything is connected. My Creation Myth series, made mostly with my fingertips and raw pigments, is about translating - listening to - the cosmos. My Steppe series is about looking into the void, being there and understanding the fullness of nothing, the light in emptiness. Tengri is about what happens when I close my eyes and travel inwards to receive messages through my body - there is a figurative aspect to these abstractions which is more about the body being a tool, a medium, or a vessel.”
It is a process that allows her to express, with particular force, the character of the steppe and its resistance to permanence, order, and ownership. Sweeping thin veils of watery colour with wide brushes across a canvas on the floor, the artist finds her way into a memory of the vast open plains, flooded with light, constantly shifting in tones. Layered in a succession of pigments and washes, they resemble monumental water colours, and call to mind the soak stain fluidity of Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings and Turner’s moody landscapes. Completing the work with her finger tips, as if moving through a dust storm, or a cloud, she invites the viewer into a moment of reckoning with the unknown.
“It is a shamanic action - not ritualistic (because in a ritual you expect a cause and effect). I need to come completely empty to the studio, and when I start it is like feeling through the dark waiting for something to happen. I close my eyes and glimpse things - like the orange flash of a fox’s tail as it vanishes at the corner of my eye - and with my brush I can grasp it, catch her tail and follow her to unravel a kind of mystery. These visions are my invitation to work.”
This is the spark that ignites her process, “sometimes it's a vibrational thing, others it’s a particular colour, a pale shimmer of gold for example. When it’s about vibration I always want to dance, and when I dance I get into an unconscious kind of working mode.” In her studio, the artist creates the conditions in which these visions and memories can manifest. Like a seeker, fasting in the desert, she deprives herself of everything so that she can be alone with that which she is bringing forth.
‘Its almost like imprints of the steppe on these canvas - this is fascinating - here I come to the idea of Plato and his metaphor of the cave. The prisoners perceive what is being projected onto the wall behind them as the truth. In the tale the light source is a campfire, but in a way this lack of awareness is still present in our society - what we see in our lives is only because the sunlight has illuminated it. The sun is this great projector - if we ignore the sunshine, we cannot see what we do, and without that, we don’t exist.”
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (Republic 514a–520a), is a story that compares "the effect of education (παιδεία) and the lack of it on our nature". We might see the artist as philosopher, once a prisoner in the cave, who comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not actually reality at all. The allegory outlines Plato’s theory of Forms, which proposes it is these "Forms" (or "Ideas"), and not the material world known to us through sensation, that possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. In this sense, it was only after Aigana left her homeland that she began to articulate her essential feelings about it.
“It did not come easily, I had to teach myself how to create this effect. Essentially I am veiling with light washes of watered down colour on canvas. I start with huge brushes in really big physical gestures to cover the whole picture plane. You cannot do it quickly. You have to apply one layer of colour, wait until it is completely dry, then apply another and wait again. It is a lengthy process, and works like a musical score - with each new layer resonating with the one beneath. I then finish the painting with my finger tips, using oil which dries slowly. I dance around the painting, touching it in different places to produce vibrational tones, synonymous with the flickering of light in the steppe.”
In this context, her studio is like a “safe cave” where she can abandon herself to the process; take leave of the outside world, and be immersed in the flow of work. It is a site of production where she is neither vulnerable, or fearful that ”someone will come and take your body away whilst you are working”, or disrupt the messages being received and channeled through the work. A pure, psychic space where she can be guided by intuition and instinct. As a result, studio visits with Aigana are mind altering. Like walking into a cave that was actually a forgotten temple, one senses this is a sacred space. It captures the imagination, and shows you your own shadow dancing on the wall.
“I think that art is sacred nectar from a human, I think we are here for that. We condense the information we receive (from the light) into objects, and make things that reflect how we understand the world. It’s a process that allows cosmic information - nature’s story - to come through us. Our personal lives, our struggles are not important - what is important is what we leave behind. That is why I believe art is the most valuable thing in the world - it is a human thing, compact with information, made to be discovered. Mona Lisa is there, not the artist who has disappeared, and we still relate to her, talk to her, understand things through her - even cry seeing her.”
Conjuring the atmospheric emptiness of the vast Eurasian Steppe, radiant and mutable, these works capture the ephemeral nature of colour found in places absent of human construct, and call to mind the words of Michel Seuphor. “There must be a kind of painting totally free of the dependence on the figure - or object - which like music, illustrates nothing, tells no story, and launches no myth. Such a painting would simply evoke the incommunicable kingdoms of the spirit, where dream becomes thought, where line becomes existence.”
Like portals into another dimension, Steppe collapse the distance between her two worlds. They express Aigana’s spiritual connection to the topographical vastness of her native land, the world's largest landlocked country and ninth-largest country on the planet. As if she had raised a canvas in the desert, they describe how light interacts with the material world to show us essential truths, and offer us a chance to contemplate something wider. Gracing the walls of private homes, institutions and prestigious venues world wide, Aigana’s paintings address some of the deep, recurring themes in art and spirituality, in particular how we experience the mysterious laws of nature and find our place in the universe.
“When you are in this place, absent of any human constructs, you begin to empty your mind, and then you begin to observe the self. It is a form of dynamic meditation, where you are liberated from all you have accumulated, and it is sometimes painful as you must look at every part of the self. It is why in the Steppe we have Tengri, an ancient, silent religion in which you relate the self to nature and understand you are a part of it."
Above is an excerpt from the Steppe book produced by Aigana Gali and written by Nico Kos Earle.
Nico Kos Earle is a writer and curator who spent her formative years in Paris, with an MA in Literature with Philosophy from Trinity College, Dublin. Vice Chair of the Critics Circle, she has a column on Artlyst (A Quiet Lunch /Huffington Post) & ongoing collaboration with The Colour Project. Focused on developing artists in early to mid-career, she regularly writes catalogue and title essays and poetry for a wide range of artists (Hamish Mackie, Nancy Cadogan, Deborah Tarr, Chris Levine, Aigana Gali, Andrea Hamilton). Her most recent books include Joost Vandebrug's Cince Lei, Jeff Becton, Emma Witter and Nelio Sonego, Museum of Rome. She has curated numerous shows on the theme of our connection to nature (Botanicae, Sense of Place, DRIFT, SURFACE, Sacred Geometry) and conceived of the BLUE Edition, first inaugurated at AH Studios, for Blue Marine Foundation. Nico is currently working on a series of poems, a special commission for the Science Museum and a short film Oceanum Voces with Dawn Dudek.
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