-1.png&w=3840&q=75)
THE SILENCE OF CENTURIES
by Tabigat Kozhanbayev
The art of Tabigat Kozhanbayev emerges from a space where the ancient breath of the steppe meets the industrial traces of the present. His works are not merely objects made of leather, metal, wood, and rubber. They are testimonies to an invisible dialogue - between archaic memory and contemporary time, between stillness and movement, between the human and the material. In the composition “Silence of Centuries”, leather and metal are enclosed within a circle of an automobile tire - a symbol of the road, of movement, of time. From within the circle emerges a human face, like an artifact, a mask, a memory of those who came before us. Its silence is not the absence of speech but the concentrated experience of generations. The industrial material surrounding the sacred image creates tension between past and present, organic and mechanical, motion and stillness.
About the Artist
Kozhanbayev Tabigat Tolemіsuly (born June 20, 1966, Kaztalov District, Zhuldyz village) is an artist and craftsman, a member of the Union of Artists of Kazakhstan (since 1993). He graduated from the Gogol Art College in Almaty (1992) and Abai Almaty State University (1997). He is a master who contributes to the development of traditional national crafts. The items he creates — such as saba, mes, torsyk, talys, baspak, konek, sandyk, shaksha and many others — are showcased in various museums across the country.
Curator's Note
In Kozhanbayev’s work there is a constant sense of the path. Perhaps because the artist himself is unafraid to bring together what appears incompatible: the organic and the industrial, the ancient and the avant-garde, the symbolic and the material, the past and the present. And in this intersection emerges something essential - a feeling of cultural continuity, a sense that heritage does not vanish but transforms. Tabigat Kozhanbayev does not reconstruct the past, nor does he illustrate mythology. He does something else: he restores to the viewer the capacity to hear the silence of antiquity, a silence still alive within contemporary materials. He shows that culture does not break - it simply changes its language. His art is an act of memory shaped from leather, metal, wood, and light. It is a space where the material becomes metaphor, and metaphor becomes lived experience. A space in which we encounter ourselves - not the selves defined by the present moment, but the eternal selves that lie beneath it.