This week at MIA Anywhere, we are delighted to bring a new and exciting exhibition to the virtual landscape: Mehkari
“The most mythical female warriors in the Vainakh lore are the Mehkari, the Amazons of the North Caucasus. They were the first-born daughters, endowed with sacred power and able to provide prosperous descendants. They were raised as horsewomen, trained in archery and only allowed to marry after they fulfilled three actions of bravery, or defeated three enemies.”
- Extract from Mehkari by Luisa Soipi
Mehkari is a collaborative exhibition between MIA Art Collection and Noxchisurt. Six female artists from around the world were chosen to introduce contemporary global Chechen art. Five of the artists are currently residing far from their roots – from Germany and Belgium all the way to Jordan – and the techniques and media they employ differ vastly, although their idea of Chechnya as home and an innate longing to return is clear in their artworks.
The memory and values of home take diverse forms for each artist, nonetheless, they are all Mehkari as they carve out their own identity in the face of a new world. We invite you to take part in this new season of the MIA Anywhere virtual museum and visit Mehkari.
Artists: Asiya Al Sheshani, Asia Umarova, Luisa Soipi, Elona Saidoulaeva, Heda Sardalova and Milana Alaro
Curator: Anita Shishani
Asia Al-Sheshani
Asia Al-Sheshani (@asiya.sheshani) is an artist who graduated from Jordan University with a bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts & Multimedia Design. In her own words “Art is an instrument, a language, where one may understandand in corporate; the self and the world. Each and every question asked, such as “How do I evoke a certain feeling/emotion or how do I frame an idea elegantly, artistically?” has its answer in a multitude of mediums that digests and presents ideas and feelings in different ways for different people to understand and feel, for in essence people are different and they empathize through/with different things. It is the artists job to challenge and touch people, to move them and inspire them, to make real and meaningful that which is full of awe and wonder, through an experience… through Art”.
We are sharing with you some pictures of her “introspection” project: “Looking inward, we care about how we look on the outside, and how we are viewed by others. Have we forgotten to look inside, in order to know ourselves? And to which degree are we transparent and true? Are we brave enough to let the world see us for what we really are? Through transparency, we allow ourselves to feel our emotions, without having to understand or correct them, which allows a tidal wave of creativity to come from within, powerful and liberating, it is freedom of one’s self.”
Elona Saidoulaeva
Elona Saidoulaeva (@elonasaidoul) was born in Chechnya, and since 2000 she lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. Experimentation is a big part of her artistic process, as she constantly discover new possibilities and the intersection of different creative fields and different thoughts: “Amongst many things I get my inspiration from the mountains and letters.These two elements form a connection between the past and the future. During my childhood I often visited our village which was located in the mountains. The small serpentine road and the view were breathtaking. I was blown away by the panoramic landscapes. All my life I have been drawn to mountains, they connect to the deepest part of my soul.”. This is why the stones, threads, the lines drawn and physical are the elements that always come back to her work, by combining contrast elements as a way to create visual tensions: mechanic vs organic shapes, monolite vs fragile…
Luisa Soipi
Luisa Soipi (@luisasoipi.jpg) is a visual artist based in Germany. Luisa’s work are inspired by myths and the old Chechen narratives and folklore: “Myths are stories with ever fluid meanings, which have been continually retold across all forms of culture and reinterpreted to reflect the present-day ideas and anxieties, a constant metamorphosis reflecting the countenance of our time. They compose a major part of all cultural heritage and have an inescapable presence not only in arts, but also in our everyday life and language, constantly reminding us of who we are and where we come from.”.
We are sharing with you her artwork called “DaNanA’ which is a wordplay of two Chechen words: DA (father) and NANA (mother). This work is a visual translation of Luisa’s research about the cultural heritage of moder day Chechens and a personal odyssey to her own ancestry. The projection animates a part of her sequenced DNA code as an allegorical bridge between the millenia old symbolism of the Caucasus and the symbolism of her inherited DNA data.
Asia Umarova
Asia Umarova (@asyaumarova) is a Chechen artist and writer. She has had 7 solo exhibitions in Grozny, Tbilisi, Saint-Petersburg, Vittorio Veneto; and her illustrations were published on multiples magazines and books. Her art theme is the memory about the war, which the artist has seen since she was a little girl and stories about her grandparents, which were deported to Kazakhstan in 1944, year of the Checheno-Ingush USSR. Asia shares with us: “I started drawing when the war in Chechnya began. I was 9 years old. White sheets of paper became my companion, with whom I could share my feelings and describe my experiences through pencils and paints. My drawing style changed from realism to impressionism. There was a period when I only created black and white paintings. In 2013, I underwent a difficult eye surgery that restricted me from using any electronic devices; I was bored. By accident, in an old cupboard, I came across a blank canvas and two pots of gouache paint: black and white. I decided to use them in a painting on a blue canvas and I understood suddenly that that was something I could do, something I had been searching for for a long time but had not found until that moment. Every painting of mine contains a story. When I begin, I always imagine a short cartoon and then I pause it mentally and think of the most important moment from the whole clip. Every painting lets me relive a memory. What is my work about? Migration, memory, war, human rights, memories, dreams, death, women’s rights. The characters in my paintings have their backs turned to the viewers as I believe that a person is what they are surrounded by: events, people, lives. The internal world of a person is more valuable to me than the way they look. A person’s feelings are important. Many of the paintings are tied to my biography, my parents’ stories, as well as my grandparents’ stories.”
Milana Alaro
Milana Alaro (@milana.alaro) is a self-taught Chechen artist and architecture student, living and working in Constance, South-Germany, and works as a freelance artist since 2016. Her art is figurative, abstract and Neo-expressionism, where her main content is the human being in different forms of emotions and interpersonal connections. Her art interacts with the observer through colors, expresion and composition.
Heda Sardalova
Heda Sardalova (@hedadaism) is based in Belgium and she finds her art works theme in paradoxes and confrontations. Her work Artist’s Book is a place where she creates an association of different subjects, using various techniques: “eventually when the space in a book isn’t what fits the best for a certain confrontation of ideas, I usually draw with a black thin pen or the extreme opposite which is oil pastels. Adhesive tape is one of my favourite material as well because of my meditative technique of drawing that is based on creating layers on layers, echoing to the years a human passes through to find himself while living in a family/society in the physical and psychological aspects.”
