To everything, spurn, spurn, spurn
No.9 Cork Street
London
Curated by Slavs and Tatars and Asya Yaghmurian

Curated by Slavs and Tatars and Asya Yaghmurian, the exhibition presents works by
eight artists exploring notions of disdain and contempt. To spurn comes from the
verb to strike back, to kick back: revealing our physiological and emotional urge to
reject. It also functions as self-protection, a softer mode of refusal that sets
boundaries while leaving room for care.
The opening salvo of scorn, though, is an offering, of some sort: we live in times of
plenitude, be they visual, discursive, or informational. And yet, we are surrounded
by shortages everywhere: empathetic, humanitarian, educational, cultural, economic
and environmental. In this dissonance, contemporary culture offers itself as a space
and a language for spurning: a way to set limits, refuse harmful scripts, and to leave
room for care.
Revisiting the famous 1965 song by The Byrds, “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything
There Is a Season),” newly commissioned paintings, watercolours, and sculptures
ask what it means to kick back, whether at a lover or an epoch. The song adapts
and sets to music a passage from the book of Ecclesiastes, (Old Testament, 3:1–8)
that talks about the human experiences as paired opposites: birth and death,
building and breaking, war and peace, and suggests there is a time for every human
activity. But the refrain “Turn! Turn! Turn!” And the closing plea “...t’s not too late”
added by the Byrds tilt the question towards agency and hope, reminding us that
refusal, repair, and renewal each have their season. Against that backdrop of turning
seasons and turning to disdain, the artists ask What is a season of contempt, when
refusal is necessary and when repair becomes possible.
All the artists hail from Central Asia and the Caucasus, in the widest geographic and
affective sense, be they diasporic or local. Akhmat Bikanov’s watercolours delicately
whisper desire as an eruptive force of portraiture while Javkhlan Ariunbold’s
effervescent paintings combine ancient Mongol motifs of death and wisdom with
contemporary anthropocene technology. Together, the voices in the exhibition draw
a through-line of refusal, repair, and renewal. The region is enjoying particular
interest of late within the cultural fields, with the imminent début of the Bukhara

Biennial and the opening of two new arts institutions in Almaty: the Almaty Museum
of Art and Tselinny Center for Contemporary Culture. The exhibition at Artwin offers
a further consideration of this milieu through the voices of both emerging and
established artists.

• Javkhlan Ariunbold, 1990, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
• Akhmat Bikanov, 1996, Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria, Russia
• Bakhyt Bubikanova, 1985–2023, Aktobe/Astana, Kazakhstan
• Saule Dyussenbina, 1971, Karaganda, Kazakhstan
• Nuria Nurgalieva, 1998, Naberezhnye Chelny, Republic of Tatarstan, Russia
• Yuma Radne, 2001, Ulan-Ude, Buryad-Mongolia, Russia
• Shamil Shaaev, 1988, Ufa, Republic of Bashkortostan, Russia
• Slavs and Tatars, 2006
• Alexander Volkov, 1886–1957, Fergana/Tashkent, Uzbekistan