M HKA Ensembles

Installation, 105 x (40 x 60 cm).

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. S0426).

While traveling in the south of Kazakhstan in 2002, Vorobyev and Vorobyeva became interested in ‘socio-coloristic’ relations. They noticed that the usual color red, used as the attribute color of everything Soviet, had been supplanted by a shade of blue known as 'kok'. Their work Kazakhstan. Blue Period, a series of photographs acquired by M HKA, documents this nationwide color spree graphically and with warm humor. As Yelena Vorobyeva puts it herself: ‘The canonical state symbols of the communists had been subjected to total desacralization. The color of the new independent Kazakhstan is blue; symbolizing many things – the heavenly blue sky, the pagan celebration of spring, the blue domes of Islamic mosques, the dream of the inaccessible ocean’s expanses – the color blue satisfied the majority and entered the mass consciousness as the best color, the ‘right’ color. The blue dream of eternal spring, manifest in color, has spilled across Kazakhstan, adding some optimistic luster to our dim steppe vistas.’