Saule Suleimenova's Decolonial Practice Reclaims Kazakh History Through Plastic and Photographs

For two decades, Kazakh artist Saule Suleimenova has been reinterpreting archival images to shed light on women and marginalized communities. Her artistic journey commenced in 2002 with a pre-Soviet image featuring three brides. Since 2014, she has been crafting collages from repurposed plastic bags in her ongoing series, Kazakh Chronicle (2004–ongoing), which juxtaposes historic warrior monuments. In her 2014 series, No Cultural Value, she critiques how contemporary Kazakh artworks are bureaucratically categorized. Suleimenova's Residual Memory series (2018–ongoing) addresses intergenerational trauma. After President Nursultan Nazarbayev's resignation in 2019, she produced Plastic Diary of Changes (2019). Her work Tuman. Qandy Qantar (2023) reflects the violence from the January 2022 protests in Zhanaozen, capturing themes of beauty and suffering.