From the Editors

Well it’s that time again: time for  our second Annual Student Voices Edition, both born out of and into COVID, unrest and global transformations, and we are very excited to share it with you! One of our core philosophies at Angime is that true conversation must include distinct, unique, and diverse voices, and we seek out authors and artists who are as brilliant as they are different. The conversation that emerges between these voices often comes as a surprise even to us. For instance, we didn’t set out to represent only women artists this year, and it wasn’t until we were ready to publish that we realized all of this edition’s voices come from the amazingly talented and diverse female student body at Nazarbayev University. However, this is not the only thing that unites the writers and artists in this issue. The voices in this edition are voices of witness – witness of turmoil inside countries, families, ourselves; witness of processes of exploration and writing; witness of one’s own culture, other cultures, and the inner and outer landscapes, both foreign and familiar.

We have Zhanel Mektepbayeva’s story “Returning Home,” a subtle and beautiful exploration of two sisters over time, their connection and disconnection. Moving between one sister’s written expectations and memories and her present wandering through her current life, the warmth of her mother’s cooking, and the absence of her sister until they finally reunite again, in a devastatingly powerful final scene.  We have Ariadna Linn’s “Gostinyi Dvor” – the direct, succinct and terrifying essay on witnessing the everyday war waged on peaceful protest in Russia. Liliya Mukhamejanova, in her lyric essay “A Poem is a Refraction,” observes “a change in the direction of a ray [of light] from the external world when passing through the poet’s inner self,” as these voices transmute experience into art. 

 We have Bibinur Salykova’s study of one’s own relationship with languages, space, reflection and memory in her poems, “Vegetarian,” “A Night of a Merger,” and “Plastic Bag.” Lyazzat Toleutay’s poem “Anxiety Attack” witnesses the tides of anxiety within one’s inner landscape. 

The three artists in this issue are looking at what is familiar; they look into it and beyond. Kamila Kurkumbayeva’s “About Love: Abstraction 1”–  is a semiotics of love. At first, a flat red panel, a simple and neat substitution for the real heart becomes, when you look again, something like a sonogram of the flesh in love, with yellowed sinews. Dinara Seksembayeva’s watercolor deepens the familiar iconography of traditional Kazakh female identity revealing through the artist’s choices the humanity of the subject and of the artist. Each sector of her paintings reveals a life of its own. And her still life clings to exuberance, trying to keep and contain it through the seasons passing into dormancy. The perspective in Ayazhan Toleubek’s photographs greedily soaks in the unfamiliar. As a bystander, we may not know what to look at until we realize that everything around the frame has disappeared, and the photo’s subject (whether buildings or  highways) has become more than an object– it has become animated. In the third image, when some of the human figures look into another camera in the foreground we feel most clearly that the photographer is magnetized, transformed by a landscape that sees and does not register the one who has captured it.

During the isolation of global pandemic, the more inside-voice conversation between artists and their work kept many of us from despair. Now, at Nazarbayev University we are again an in-person community, and we at Angime look forward to sharing these Student Voices, meeting you spontaneously and talking about them, and engaging in a new season of witness, creation, and celebration.