b. 1964, Tyulkubas railway station, Kazakhstan

(1964, Tulkibas – lives and works in Almaty) Yerbossyn Meldibekov is a conceptually driven contemporary Central Asian artist. His practice critically deconstructs power and historical myths, particularly Soviet and post-Soviet legacies. Trained in monumental sculpture in Almaty, the collapse of the Soviet Union led him to embrace installation, performance, video and photography, transforming artistic material into a medium for ideological analysis. His project, Communism Peak, directly addresses how ideologies politicise nature through the naming of mountain peaks in celebration of state leaders or political systems of the time. One such example is Ismoil Somoni Peak, located in current day Tajikistan, which was renamed five times since the early 20th century and bore the name of Communism Peak once. Using water basins as ‘local ready-mades’ and shaping them into mountains, Meldibekov creates a landscape that resonates in mountainous Central Asia and invites viewers to look and think beyond the beauty on view. In the objects, he employs his characteristic irony to expose the absurdity and repetition that underpin his ongoing archaeology of power.