Portrait of my Daughter I
2010
Photography, 80.2 x 53.5 x 2.3 cm.
Materials: lambda print, alu di-bond
Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. S0441_08).
Part of Menlibayeva's Small Brave Girls series, which shows children living in the periphery of post-soviet Kazakhstan, in a remote village that has not escaped the changes of the soviet and postsoviet eras. The children are surrounded by corpses - corpses of the animals they live with, live from, and consume. They grow up alongside death, and learn to accept it as part of life. Their faces betray a wisdom unknown to city dwellers, who live in separation from nature and from the presence of death. Here, Menlibayeva offers insight in the developments of modern Kazakhstan, the every day life of its people, and the upbringing of its next generation.