Yelena and Viktor Vorobyev are a duo of contemporary Kazakhstani artists. Their practice spans photography, installations, objects, texts, and video. The Vorobyevs’ key methods cover observation, analysis, typologization, cataloguing, irony, and surrealism. Key themes are everyday life, power and society, and the post-Soviet space.

Their practice is grounded in recording the everyday. They read the city street as a text and decode its elements – for example, road signs (“Random Observations,” 1999–2004) or street lighting (“Jewellery for the Sky,” 2001–2007). They also experiment with form and material: altering states of matter (“Winter Sublimating Object,” 2004) or placing objects in a new, natural context (the series “Fossils,” 1996–early 2000s). A number of their works document instruments of social control (“Vintage,” 2018) and lampoon blind obedience to authority (“Lenin Hills,” 2015).

Exhibitions featuring their work include the Festival of Creative Youth “Zhiger. XV Republican Exhibition” (Exhibition Hall of the Union of Artists, Almaty, 1988); the Central Exhibition Hall of the Directorate of Art Exhibitions and Auctions (Almaty, 1994); the VI Istanbul Biennial (1999); “No Mad’s Land” (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2002); “Tracing Roads through Central Asia: Dilemmas and Travellers’ Perspectives” (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 2008); “At the Crossroads: Contemporary Art from the Caucasus and Central Asia” (Sotheby’s, London, 2013); the LVII Venice Biennale (2017); and “Phantom Reality” (Aspan Gallery and DOM 36, Almaty, 2022).

Photographs of the Vorobyevs’ works and information about them are stored in the collection of the Documentation project: Yelena and Viktor Vorobyevs’ collection and the archive of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art – Almaty (SCCA).

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Photograph provided by Yelena and Viktor Vorobyev