• Almagul Menlibayeva

    Video still from Fire talks to me (2015). Image: Almagul Menlibayeva & YARAT Contemporary Art Centre

  • Video still from Fire talks to me (2015). Image: Almagul Menlibayeva & YARAT Contemporary Art Centre

  • Video still from Fire talks to me (2015). Image: Almagul Menlibayeva & YARAT Contemporary Art Centre

Almagul Menlibayeva

Kazakh-born Almagul Menlibayeva draws on long-forgotten links between Venice and Azerbaijan for YARAT Contemporary Art Space’s event The Union of Fire and Water. Juxtaposing images of the Mukhtarov Palace, a late-19th-century Venetian Gothic piece of architecture in Baku, with images of the exhibition’s setting, the Palazzo Barbaro, which was once owned by a 15th-century Azeri-speaking diplomat, Menlibayeva generates geographically unfixed “hybrids” of “Venetianness” and “Bakuness” in a split-screen video. Bound up in one uncanny reality, these two geographically distinct territories, Menlibayeva reminds us, have cultures that are deeply embedded, and dependent on one another.