Maya Kóvskaya, Author at INVERSE JOURNAL

Maya Kóvskaya

Winner of the 2010 Yishu Award for Critical Art Writing, ecological political theorist, curator and cultural critic, Maya Kóvskaya (PhD UC Berkeley, 2009) has authored, co-authored, edited, translated, and contributed to numerous books and articles on the intersection of contemporary art with the political, cultural, and ecological. She has taught and lectured extensively contemporary Asian art, the Anthropocene, politics, culture, contemporary Asian art, and the curatorial, at universities, museums, and public institutions worldwide. As curator and critic, and/or academic advisor, she has worked on over 35 contemporary art exhibitions and public art interventions across Asia, Europe, and North America. She is Art Editor for positions: Asia Critique (Duke University Press), and a member of the ongoing Anthropocene Project organized by the HKW and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

Exhuming the Ideological Corpse of Soviet Socialism: Marat Raiymkulov — by Maya Kóvskaya

February 23, 2019 | Art

Art critic, curator and theorist Maya Kóvskaya presents the Pol Pot series of drawings by Kyrgyz contemporary artist Marat Raiymkulov, providing a broad perspective into understanding the artist’s work in its post-Soviet Central Asian context. The article discusses the relevance of the Pol Pot set of drawings and “hand-drawn animations” (displayed here in video form) to reflect on the multiple ways in which Marxism and Leninism embedded itself in everyday Central Asian life and continued to exert its influence on the region and on its peoples during the post-Soviet era. Kóvskaya explains how Raiymkulov effectively employs his unique visual language to explore the ways that “people live within an ideological field” brought about by a Marxist-Leninist cultural legacy in contemporary Kyrgyzstan. In contextualizing Raiymkulov’s work, Kóvskaya brings our attention to the great details embedded within the artist’s oeuvre that further uncover the greater complexities of his place of origin along with reflections on questions of ideology, state, nationhood, community, discourse, the “social power of Capital,” among others. The article is accompanied here by captioned images from the artist’s work along with five animations in video format that integrate the Pol Pot series.