Join the artist talk and panel discussion with the artist Nurbol Nurakhmet, Dr. Rebecca Daniels, Dr. Maia Kirchkheli, and the curator Indira Dyussebayeva – Ziyabek

 

The focus of the talk will be on the current solo exhibition, Panopticon: The Unsettled Body. The artist expands the definition of space beyond its traditional understanding; not only situating his figures within interiors and landscapes but spaces of memory, the past, and political ideology. Working in large-scale painting, drawing, and collage, Nurakhmet’s practice explores the poetics of inhabiting a body as a site for subjectivity, discipline, and memory. His practice depicts the ways in which the human experience engages in an ever-changing dialogue with the spaces we inhabit.

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Participants:

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Nurbol Nurakhmet (b. 1986) is a Kazakh artist, working in painting, collage, drawing and lithography. He lives and works in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where he trained at the Kazakh National Academy of Art. He also received a Master of Fine Arts at the Academy of Art at the University of San Francisco in the USA.

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Nurakhmet’s practice demonstrates how the depiction of the body can convey both the complex inner world of the individual and the socio-political climate of a nation. In this way, his work oscillates between the personal and the collective. Nurakhmet’s figures are often depicted nude, with obscured features, or without skin or heads. This vulnerable depiction of the human figure alludes to political violence and the experienced loss of identity, history, and culture in his native country. Constructing enigmatic scenes, his practice reflects on spaces of memory and navigates moments of introspection, nostalgia, and protest.

 

Dr. Rebecca Daniels is a Senior Researcher at the Estate of Francis Bacon where she has worked since 2007. She is the Associate Editor of Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné (2016). Daniels is currently writing a book on Bacon’s early career as an interior decorator and how he transformed into a painter. She is also co-authoring a book Francis Bacon: The Artist’s Materials for the Getty Conservation Institute in L.A. She completed a doctorate at the University of Oxford on Walter Sickert and while there catalogued the furniture collection at the Ashmolean Museum. Since 2008, Daniels has explored the influence of Sickert on Bacon bringing together her two research specialties. Daniels was a Trustee of the Sidney Nolan Trust from 2014-20 and curated Transferences: Sidney Nolan in Britain at Pallant House Gallery.

 

Dr. Maia Kirchkheli is a psychoanalyst and a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She is currently in full-time private practice in London. She teaches psychoanalytic theory at IOPA, BPA, and UCL. Besides being a psychoanalyst, she has been involved in various artistic pursuits and her main area of interest is an overlap of creativity and psychoanalysis. Kirchkheli, M (2017) ’Beyond words’ won the Winnicott Essay Prize marking the publication of the Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott by Oxford University Press in 2017. Kirchkheli, M (2018) ‘Two faces of Medea: from an arrow to a sword’ presented at the IPA conference, ‘Medea: Femininity, Motherhood, Love and Hate’, organized by COWAP (Committee of Women and Psychoanalysis, IPA) in Tbilisi, Georgia. Her paper Holding and Visceral Attention, Bodily Concentration of an Analyst Under Covid-19 Lockdown won Rozsika Parker Prize 2020, run by the Journal of British Psychotherapy where it was published.

 

Indira Dyussebayeva-Ziyabek is an independent curator and the co-founder of the International Art Development Association (IADA), a non-profit organisation supporting and promoting contemporary art from Kazakhstan and Central Asia. She founded Ainalaiyn Space in January 2022. Indira holds an undergraduate degree and MA in History of Art from University College London (UCL). Her academic research explores themes including memory and psychoanalytic theory; cultural trauma; the maternal body; and the corporeal metaphorics of nomadic dwellings. These research questions are discussed in dialogue with contemporary art practices. Indira has curated and co-curated numerous international projects.

 

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