Few artists have kept their finger on the pulse of the layered cultural, artistic and sociohistorical landscape of Central Asia as firmly as Erbossyn Meldibekov (b. 1964), who has been making works that serve as metaphors for the ever shifting geopolitics of the region since the early 1990s. The Point Becomes a Circle, and Time Turns into a Ball in a Curved Space, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition at Rossi & Rossi Hong Kong, will take place on the 8th of February 2025, showcasing a brand new body of works from the past five years. In them, Meldibekov returns to the visual foundations of his oeuvre, namely the point and the circle, as symbols to expound the art history and its contemporary discourse of the steppes in his native Kazakhstan.

For Meldibekov, a point, on the one hand, can be a geographical or topographical marking; it can also represent a location on a map or an event on the historical mapping of a place. In Karl Marx Peak and Friedrich Engels Peak (2024), for instance, the artist examines the changes in the toponym of several points on a map – the peaks of the Tien Shan, Alatau and Pamir mountains of Central Asia. Since the nineteenth century, these natural sites have undergone a series of renamings to adapt to the shifts in political power and ideology in the region, from nomadic societies, tsarist Russia and the former Soviet Union to today’s nation-states. The work consists of several aluminium basins and pots whose surfaces the artist hammered and drilled to resemble topographical maps. On them, he engraved points, lines and numbers with the names of the three peaks and their elevation marks. The result is a summary of all the past and existing names that these same mountain peaks have assumed, an imaginary chart on which time and space coalesce into a chimerical landscape.

The artist considers a circle, on the other hand, to be a flattened, crushed point, a metaphor for the cyclical nature of Central Asia’s historical events and the fate of their participants. This is well illustrated in Unmasking the Avant-Garde Artist (2024), where Meldibekov turns his attention to the unrealised Turkestan avant-garde of the early twentieth century. Also known as ‘the eastern wing of the Russian avant-garde’, the movement included a group of Russian artists who were significantly influenced by modernist art and ideas. For various reasons, they found themselves in cities such as Tashkent, Samarkand and Ashgabat in the 1910s and ’20s, often as instructors in art schools. Prominent amongst them was Alexander Volkov (1886–1957), who had a marked impact on the art scene in Uzbekistan. Volkov made his name with his radical geometric paintings inspired by Primitivism, Suprematism and Cubism. However, since the release of ‘On the restructuring of literary and artistic organisations’, a Soviet decree dictating the latest desirable trends and formats in arts and literature, he had been forced to roll back his artistic experiments and reformat his art in the style of Socialist Realism. Volkov’s transition to figurativeness took place gradually, from frame to frame, painting to painting. Meldibekov, in his signature maverick rebellion, decided to liberate Volkov’s paintings from their realist mimicry by applying a layer of white primer to selected areas of his own replicas of the artist’s works. In doing so, he obscures the figures in the late Volkov’s paintings and restores them to their modernist abstraction.

Fast-forward to the 1990s, when Kazakhstan first established its statehood following the fall of the former Soviet Union: a new, if not self-claimed, national hero emerged in the form of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the country’s first president. From 2011 to 2018, a six-episode epic film based on his biography was produced to cast the politician in the light of The Chosen One for the newly independent country of Kazakhstan. Iconography from religious art and popular culture abounds in the film, which was executed in a style merging the old Soviet cinema of the 1960s with soap operas from the 1990s. It therefore elevated Nazarbayev almost into the pantheon of gods and deities on Mount Olympus. Meldibekov was amused. With his iconic sarcasm, he created an installation of movie posters titled Posthistory (2021–22). Playing with the words ‘poster’ and ‘history’ – ironically connecting them with the sociological concept of ‘post-history’ – the work is composed of ten posters borrowing from various frames of the film. In one example, the former president’s figure acquires monumentality, as he was literally lifted off the ground during his visit to the Kaaba in Mecca, recalling the theme of the Ascension in European art. Soon after the release of the film’s last episode, a large-scale uprising erupted in Kazakhstan with its main slogan, ‘Shal, ket!’ (‘Get out of here, Old Man!’). Indeed, out went the Old Man into his political heaven, for good.

Onwards, the cycle of history continues, in a cyclical manner, in a sphere of paradoxes and irony. So does Meldibekov, like the narrators of legends and tales, he continues to record, critique and construct the ever-changing, complex societies of Central Asia with his sculptures, paintings and moving images.