Page 18 - Steppe - Aigana Gali

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Introduction
Aigana Gali a multidisciplinary artist who works across a wide range of media, from canvas and paper to textiles and film, with a process that
is determined by the character of each series. Born on the ancient crossing of the Great Silk Road in Almaty, Kazakhstan, to a Georgian mother and Kazakhstani father, Aigana’s formative years were spent in the wild, open cradle of the Eurasian Steppe. Trained as a dancer, her artistic sensibility was fine tuned to the rhythmic character of place, in particular the vibrational quality of light: how the waves bounce or shadows are cast in the shifting theatre of colour. This rich cultural heritage is an infinite source to her work, which she brings to life through the universal language of colour and form.
In relocating to London, Aigana began to explore ways to communicate and translate her cultural milieu. Over the past decade she has developed an important body of work, delineated by series: Creation Myth, Steppe and Tengri. Each representing a metaphorical chapter in her evolution as an artist and thinker, she adapts her technique and selects materials according to their essential, philosophical narrative. Her work explores some of the deep, recurring themes in art and spirituality, of how we experience the mysterious laws of nature and find our place in the world.
In Creation Myth, first shown at the Saatchi Gallery in 2019, Aigana paints a story richly woven with the symbols of her ancestors, enlisting the petroglyphs of Kazakh caves and the cosmology of the Tengri, an ancient form of spirituality found in the Steppe. “The meaning of life for followers of the Tengri is to be at one with nature, and in this we are sustained by both the spirits of heaven and earth: the eternal blue sky and the warm yellow mother beneath our feet.” The paintings in this series follow the life cycle of a cell (or individual) searching for union and completion, and they are all made with the artist’s fingertips. Using her own body as a tool, she begins to work once in a state of meditative stillness. Watching particles move through the light, she waits for the cascade of energy which activates “the atoms of my own body which then participates in this dance of energies.” Like a dancer moving to a song, she traces the story’s outline with her fingers, and works pigments into the canvas. The resulting scenes capture the dreamlike logic of mythology, or ancient hunting scenes discovered on the walls of caves.