The Shamanic Works of Minsalim Timergazeev and Other Artists of the First International Woodcarving Festival of Uvat

In Tobol’sk, Minsalim Timergazeev (1950-) exercises both the profession of shaman and artist, i.e. a carver prevalently of wood and bone, often mammoth tusks. His works are linked to the magic and mythical world of the shamanic system of beliefs of his ancestors and the traditional art of the Ob-Ugrians, which he was able to study closely, participating in expeditions organized by the Museum of Fine Arts of Tyumen’. The most frequent subjects of inspiration for Minsalim are: the figure of the shaman as “medium” between the three spheres of the cosmos, including the god Mir-Susne-Hum “World-Surveyor-Man”, the shaman par excellence of Vogul mythology; the legendary totemic animals such as the reindeer or the bear, which descended to earth from the Great Bear; sacred flora and fauna; hunting scenes, which recall the prehistoric rock paintings; the sun and the “centre of cosmos”; the magic flight and metamorphosis. The “Minsalim Atelier”, which he directed, is committed to collaborating with other artists to revive motifs of ancestral tradition. Among them there is Margarita Safraleeva-Botsman, of Tatar origin, who, in her series of drawings entitled “Sibirskie amazonki” (Siberian Amazons), represented the energy of Tatar women through the depiction of the courageous, nomadic witch-horsewomen of the past, painted, according to the shamanic imagination, not only on the backs of horses, but also of totemic animals like wolves and bears. The atelier of Minsalim participated in the organization of the First International Woodcarving Festival “Legends of Siberian Land” held in Uvat (2009). The same Timergazeev, along with Sergey Luginin of Salekhard, presented an original work, which metaphorically describes the initiatory, predestined journey of the life and death of man. The exclusive use of wood by artists of the festival brings immediately to mind the sacredness of the tree and the forest, forgotten by industrialized societies. It was specifically emphasized by Sergey Fedotov of Kazan’ (Tatarstan) and Galina Medvedeva of Uvat, who, in their works, have respectively shaped the spirit and the heart of wood. Other exhibitors have also referred to the natural habitat. For example, the Udmurt artist Victor Yakovlev presented the figure of the bear in his semi-divine and human characters and Galina Polikarpova of Semenov has displayed the spirit of the Irtysh river as a fish-boat, like a spaceship, the original image which links the past with the future. In these artists of the post-Soviet Russia, interest in ethnographic data, which is inherited from the early twentieth century avant-garde art, is combined with the recovery of tradition as an expression of cultural identity. Their works enhance the culture of the province, long ignored, distinguishing between contemporary art forms which manifest self-deconstruction of the national “myths” and postmodern irony. Minsalim Timergazeev is one of the catalysts of a conscious revival of tradition in the arts. He is helped in this task by his profession of the shaman who knows how to repeat and bring up to date mythical images. His artistic approach to the original myths reveals, in his more recent works, a melancholic bitterness about the aggressive progress of civilization.