The Tongue and Hunger. Stalin’s Silk Road (2022–2023) and other works

Overview

Drawing from Eurasian nomadic and Indigenous folklore, Almagul Menlibayeva’s work grapples with themes of displacement, ethnic erasure and environmental destruction under totalitarian rule in post-Soviet Central Asia. The multimedia installation The Tongue and Hunger. Stalin’s Silk Road (2022–2023) is inspired by the artist’s great-aunt Bopish, who integrated herself into the Soviet Union’s social system amid widespread deprivation, during the engineered Kazakh Famine of the early 1930s and the disappearance of her two children. The film Archipelago Karlag (2016) draws parallels between the centrality of the Gulag system to Soviet growth and the apparel industry under global capitalism, revealing how totalitarian regimes exploit labour.