On Abdymomunov Street in Bishkek, a café serves Qurt Mocha, a drink based on coffee, hot chocolate, and qurt, the local extra-salty Kyrgyz cheese. It’s easy to get addicted to it, and the presentation is aesthetic enough to make a captivating Instagram story. Perhaps it’s still a long way before this will become the next matcha latte, coveted by ‘it girls’ around the world, but certainly not for lack of trying on my part. “I always wanted to try this coffee shop,” artist Sonata Raiymkulova tells me. Elegant and slightly coy, she is certainly an ‘it girl’ of the Central Asian art world herself, “… but I’ll take some green tea instead,” she concludes. While I start feeling like an easily gulled tourist, she sits across from me in the Kölökö coffee shop, lightly tapping on her iPad and showing me her virtual portfolio. The coffee shop has a beautiful garden, with dim lights and a serene nightly atmosphere. I can’t help but notice how this contrasts with the air, which is so heavy with smog that it’s hardly breathable. Like the livability of Kyrgyz cities, issues such as pollution are precisely what Sonata, a former architect with a passion for urbanism, tackles in her work. Her drawings, installations, and performances don’t necessarily look Kyrgyz, or at least not like what foreigners would expect Central Asian art to look like. Not so much qurt in them, so to speak. Rather than attaching herself to some recognizable traditional elements, Sonata tackles the present of her city, Bishkek, where she was born and raised, and where, after her architectural studies, she took up contemporary art. Her Dō – I use the Japanese term as her father steeped her and her brother in Japanese traditions - is collaborative and a little unorthodox. In 2016, she joined Estelik (also known as “monument of memory”), a Bishkek project in which artists, artisans and participants swapped brand-new stools for old, colorful ones and piled their haul into an impromptu massive monument. In 2021, she was one of more than 40 artists from the five Central Asian countries involved in Art Plov CA, a British Council-supported project run from Tashkent. Her studies also took her to Moscow to the HSE Design School, where she graduated. In 2023, she won a Prince Claus Fund Seed Award, one of 100 awarded that year across more than 60 countries. She later told her university she had known about the prize for years but had been too scared to apply, and that winning mostly meant doubting herself less. In February 2024, she had a solo show at DREIVIERTEL in Bern, in collaboration with the Residency.ch programme. She has also had shows in Karlsruhe, Milan, Almaty, and Moscow. This summer she was back in Almaty with Bishkek Gothic, a series made with her brother Marat Raiymkulov for Efes Art Space’s Sayran city route. Raiymkulova's work moves between the personal and the political, exploring the human body as well as Bishkek's changing urban...
