Saule Dyussenbina

Born 1971 in Karaganda, Kazakhstan
Lives and works in Almaty, Kazakhstan

Art Gallery of New South Wales

Achievements of National Economy, Fountain of Friendship of Peoples of the USSR (Moscow, Russia) 2023
wallpaper
Courtesy the artist

Between 1946 and 1986, some 459 nuclear tests were conducted by the Soviet Union in the Semipalatinsk region of Kazakhstan, known as the Steppe. Despite the USSR’s insistence that the tests would not prove harmful, local people began to grow sick and to die prematurely, while the number of miscarriages, complicated pregnancies, children born with disabilities, and suicides rose. It is estimated that over 1.5 million Kazakhs were exposed to deadly fallout during those four decades, and Kazakhs living in the region today continue to suffer from higher general and cancer-related mortality rates.

The Friendship of Peoples Fountain in Moscow, located near Russia’s Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy, incorporates statues of maidens, each representing one of the USSR’s territories, including Saule Dyussenbina’s home country, Kazakhstan. Intended as a monument to ideas of unity and economic achievement, the fountain appears in Achievements of National Economy, Fountain of Friendship of Peoples of the USSR (Moscow, Russia) as a nuclear explosion. The pretense of unity is symbolically blown apart by the sheer force of atomic colonial power.

Saule Dyussenbina operates with various mediums – painting, graphics, animation, video – studying the objective world around her home, her body, her history and memory. She produces a study that leads her to the formation of an archetype and its implementation in the structure of the convergent culture of our time. In her latest works, Dyussenbina often uses the field of applied design, such as interior design and production of household items. Her works seem to be playing ping-pong with tactile and optical perception, either seizing familiar images and translating them into objects of thoughtful contemplation, or making these objects part of our home ‘shell’, returning them to the zone of tactility. 

Read more about the 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, by purchasing the catalogue here.