Red plastic adorns the canvas by painter Saule Suleimenova, which depicts the starting point of the deadly riots that shook Kazakhstan earlier this year.
The dark, brooding, wall-sized piece depicts the main square of the Central Asian country’s largest city, Almaty, with its striking Soviet-era buildings and Independence Monument celebrating Kazakh statehood.
Using her distinctive “cellophane painting technique,” Suleimenova attempted to capture a violent moment in Kazakhstan’s modern history that six months later remains fraught with unanswered questions.
The Republic’s winter of discontent began with peaceful protests over a fuel price hike before descending into chaos, killing 238 and becoming known as “Bloody January.”
Government critics say the authorities’ handling of the protests has been fraught with abuse.
The state, meanwhile, insists the country witnessed a terrorist-led coup attempt in January – a narrative that has met with widespread skepticism.
The painter Suleimenova has tried to convey the sense of injustice surrounding the events in her work.
She said her motivation to instill collective sentiment in January grew stronger after Russia – which sent troops to Kazakhstan to bolster a regime in disarray – invaded Ukraine the following month.
“With the color (red) I wanted to express the state we went through this year,” she told AFP at an exhibition of her work in Almaty.
– stripped and beaten –
Metalworker Akylzhan Kiysimbayev – who was wounded in January’s events – was still on crutches when AFP spoke to him.
He thought little about politics before finding himself on the sidelines of a violent clash between police and protesters.
Now he faces up to eight years in prison if convicted of involvement in mass riots.
Kiysimbayev said he was guarding a property his company was renovating on January 5 when stray bullets pierced the building’s windows.
He was shot in the leg while attempting to escape. While he was still recovering from an operation in the hospital, the police arrested him and beat him in the hospital corridors.
He was thrown in jail, stripped of his clothes and beaten again, he said.
“They hit us where our injuries were,” he told AFP.
“They told us: You are terrorists, you are Wahabbists!”
He was forced to appear before a judge in just his underwear.
Public uproar led to some detainees, including Kiysimbayev, being released from custody.
Authorities acknowledge some incidents of torture, including several fatalities, but little progress has been made in more than 240 investigations into ill-treatment.
None of the officers Kiysimbayev says tortured him have been charged with any crime.
President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, meanwhile, has sought to break away from the events that have rocked his rule and promised a ‘New Kazakhstan’.
Last month his government passed constitutional changes that appeared to end the influence of his 82-year-old predecessor, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who dominated the country’s politics for 30 years – a key demand at the January protests.
But Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine brought fresh uncertainty to Tokayev, whose position was strengthened after the Kremlin agreed to send troops to Kazakhstan to help quell the unrest.
– “Toxic partner” –
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch an all-out attack on Ukraine on February 24 came just over a month after a Moscow-led security bloc intervened in Kazakhstan.
Since then, Kazakhstan’s neutral stance on the conflict has angered the Kremlin.
Although Tokayev owes his survival in part to Moscow, the war in Ukraine has “changed the format of relations,” political scientist Dosym Satpayev told AFP.
The war itself, he said, is dividing opinions in Kazakhstan — an ethnically diverse country with a large Slavic minority concentrated near the border with Russia.
“Tokayev understands that Russia is a toxic partner,” he said.
New tensions in the partnership were epitomized by an awkward exchange between Tokayev and Putin in June, in which the Kazakh leader publicly disagreed with the Kremlin boss over Ukraine.
Tokayev, sitting next to Putin in St. Petersburg, said Kazakhstan will not recognize “quasi-state territories” like the rebel republics in eastern Ukraine, as Russia has done.
Kazakhstan’s foreign ministry even vowed to blacklist Russian public figure Tigran Keosayan, who branded his leadership ungrateful and threatened Kazakhstan with a Ukrainian-style invasion.
Ruslan Rafikov, an artist who wore a pro-Ukrainian T-shirt at Suleimenova’s exhibition, told AFP he thinks January’s unrest could repeat itself unless authorities improve living standards and ease political repression.
“Citizen activism has gone nowhere,” Rafikov said at the event, which coincided with former leader Nazarbayev’s birthday.
“On the contrary, it’s getting stronger.”
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