Murivat Beknazarov’s art as memory
: The collapse of the Soviet Union meant more than just the fall of a government. For many, it also brought about the end of a way of life. This includes the artist Murivat Beknazarov, who through his work fought to defend the memories of Soviet Tajikistan’s unique cultural life.
When I went to meet Murivat Beknazarov in his studio in Dushanbe for the first time, on a warm autumn day in 2018, he explained to me the location by phone. Since street names are rarely known due to frequent renaming, he told me to find the so-called “artists’ house” in the north of the city. “Just ask around, everyone knows this place,” he said. That was probably the case in Soviet times, but not anymore. As it turned out, no one knew where this place was, not even people living in neighbouring buildings.
April 11, 2024 -
Karolina Kluczewska
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Issue 3 2024MagazineStories and ideas
Over the next few years, I continued regularly visiting Beknazarov in his studio on the ground floor of a white, two-story building on what is now Omar Khayam Street. As a researcher interested in socialist art, I interviewed him multiple times: he was one of the most prominent monumental artists and painters of Soviet Tajikistan. Later, our interactions turned into a kind of friendship between a master and a novice. Every time I talked to him, I could not shake the impression that for the last 30 years he has been holding on tightly to a world that did not exist anymore. Rather than for Soviet governance, it was a nostalgia for the social world which emerged in Dushanbe in the 1970s and 1980s: a multinational society, a vibrant artistic community and prestige associated with his profession. That atmosphere profoundly contrasted with Tajikistan’s turbulent transformation after the Soviet Union’s collapse, which was marked by a civil war, poverty and mass emigration. When many of Murivat’s friends either died or left the country during the war, he stayed in Tajikistan, in the “artists’ house”, and safeguarded that lost world and its people in his memory and artworks.
This essay pays homage to the artist Murivat Beknazarov (1943-2023), whose life and works were deeply intertwined with the history of art in Tajikistan, including shifting relations between the state and artists, and a changing function of art.
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