Samara, USSR 1952-2002 Almaty, Kazakhstan

(1952, Samara – 2002, Almaty) Sergei Maslov emerged in Almaty’s art scene in the 1980s as a painter, performer, and myth-maker who embodied the contradictions of a collapsing Soviet Union and the uncertainties of a new nation-state. He was a founding member of the Night Tram, an informal artist group exploring Oriental mysticism and surrealism as tools of resistance and escape during late-Soviet stagnation. In the 1990s, he began working as a night guard and gradually became the unofficial leader of the Voyager Gallery, an independent space that served as a hub for experimental culture in post-Soviet Almaty. Maslov developed an eccentric cosmology blending irony, eroticism, and absurdist storytelling. Working across painting, video, performance, and text, he reimagined steppe mythology through science fiction and invented identities. In his 2002 installation Baikonur-2, part of the collection of the Almaty Museum of Arts, he proposed that the traditional yurt was, in fact, a disguised spaceship. His 1982 painting The Last Supper, shown in Qonaqtar, reflects both Biblical ritual and Soviet-era gatherings, a portrait of community in a time of transition. His archive remains central to contemporary art in Central Asia.