Look Gallery, Almaty, Kazakhstan
1999
The creation of the Gallery "Look" - "Onion" was not a spontaneous event. The idea to open a gallery with this name came up a long time ago. In 1993, one of the first events in Almaty held by Lidia Blinova and Anna Himmelstrand in the Union of Architects was based on the multi-semantic theme of an onion. They created a painting with an onion scent and a special device called the "stereosnifer" to simultaneously sniff the painting in various places. The pungent smell, which is tear-inducing, builds one of many associations with onions.
Carried out between 1988 and 1999, the "Clay" Project created a unique space that has now become the location of the "Look" Gallery. The bow has a set of different meanings. Its layered structure already contains a reminder of the ambiguity, the curved space that delineates an onion or a bow, the weapon of an ancient nomad. An onion, literally simple and associatively complex. From the simple use in food to the tears from its smell, to the bulging shape of the dome of Orthodox churches, and the same curved household dome of a yurt of a nomad's world. Its layers are both similar to each other and different at the same time. This association space is individual for every smallest detail. These details are what the project asks to create a shared space, "viewer-artist". In Russian, "Look" means both "an onion" and "a bow", whereas in English, the word "look" means "to see". A visual projection, a ray, conveys momentary reality by layering it onto the screen and turning it into a video. Reality is transformed into the space of illusion, where it becomes a medium beyond art and goes into a floating state. The word is just a key that opens up its own associations for everyone who is willing to hear it.
Participants: Rustam Khalfin, Olga Kolomytseva, Yulia Tikhonova, Gulsym Amir, Oksana Abramova, Akhat Indershiev, Nurlan Abdykalykov and Georgy Tryakin-Bukharov
