Highgate Three art gallery is hosting the debut show of a promising Kazakh artist exploring bodies, political protest and surveillance.
Hailed an exciting talent, Nurbol Nurakhmet has exhibited in South Korea, Azerbaijan, and his native Kazakhstan, but never before in the UK.
Held in collaboration with Ainalaiyn Space - an organisation working with international artists from regions that do not have a major presence in Europe - Panopticon: The Unsettled Body runs from April 14-May 14 at the High Street gallery.
Nurakhmet lives and works in Almaty, Kazakhstan. He trained at the Kazakh National Academy of Art and recieved a Master of Fine Arts at the Academy of Art in San Francisco.
The 38-year-old explores memory, the past, and political ideology - placing his figures within unsettling interiors and landscapes in large-scale paintings, drawings, collage and lithography.
His vulnerable figures are often depicted nude, with obscured features, or without skin, heads or hands - alluding to political violence and the loss of identity, histories and cultures in his country.
The title derives from philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham's concept of the panopticon, a prison in which a central watch tower is surrounded by a circle of cells.
While the inmates cannot see into the tower, the guards are granted unlimited surveillance of each cell, an imbalance which creates psychological uncertainty as they anticipate being observed at all times. Bentham believed this threat of constant surveillance could dramatically alter and regulate society.
Nurakhmet's enigmatic surreal scenes reveal how the depiction of the body can convey both the complex inner world of the individual and the socio-political climate of a nation.
It is this understanding of the profound impact of our environments on human experience which has shaped this body of work.
His figures shift between stillness and motion, contemplation and action, complicity and defiance, each feels isolated and swept up in their interior world.
Figures sit forlornly in Waiting Room (2018), leap with desperation in Short Cut (2021), and crouch with vulnerability in Garden Time (2021). In works such as Cosmonauts (2021), the erasure of identities is taken to extreme, and in the use of horses in Punishment (2020) or Discipline (2021) the power of the animals is explored.
Panopticon: The Unsettled Body runs from April 14-May 14 at Three Highgate, 3 Highgate High Street.
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