QOLMA QOL

Source

Tañgy Tañ is the dawn of the independent republic. National sovereignty, cultural rehabilitation, social shifts, and at the root of it all: wild capitalism. This was our «end of history», to use Fukuyama’s language. People bartered, bought, sold, sought profit and paths to well-being.

If KRI wanted to archive the spirit of this moment, it would go to the bazaar and look at what people were using. It was the market that turned Kazakhstan from a half-empty Soviet republic into a pearl of Central Asia where money rules.

Tañgy Tañ is the morning of 16 December 1991 and everything that followed. The planned economy was falling apart before one’s eyes, the ruble was turning into empty paper, ties between the republics were breaking. Old wages stopped feeding people, and the Soviet social contract (guaranteed work, housing, kindergarten) disappeared within a few years. In its place came something else, unwritten but entirely real: survive, trade, search.

The central figure of this decade was the shuttle trader. Thousands of yesterday’s engineers, teachers, and doctors set off for Istanbul, Urumqi, and Dubai, and from there brought back, in bulk and in their bags, clothing, footwear, fabrics, and household electronics. The bazaar was the point of sale. «Barakholka», «Hualian», and the «Green Bazaar» in Almaty were not merely trading spots but vast social machines: prices, acquaintances, social mobility, and shared languages took shape there. Here, in the trading rows, a new Kazakhstani urban stratum was born spontaneously and without any plan.

The bag itself is a hybrid object and in that sense an epochal one. The checkered polypropylene sack of Chinese manufacture became a visual constant of the 90s across the entire post-Soviet space. English-language anthropologists would later call it the «Ghana-must-go bag» or the «Bangladeshi laundry bag», but for our region it is first of all the «Chinese baul», inseparable from shuttle trading.

In parallel with the market bustle, a quiet, persistent work of redefinition was under way: in November 1993 the first tenge appeared, and from the very first releases the Kazakhstani banknotes assembled a new national pantheon: Al-Farabi, Suyunbai, Chokan Valikhanov, Abai, Abylai-khan. Money became a micro-gallery of memory being recovered.

Interpretation

The baul is the constant companion of the Kazakhstani bazaar. A newspaper is pinned to it, an attempt to fix an instant snapshot of a rapidly changing world.

The caps carry the first Kazakhstani banknotes, sewn on top. People once said «bread is the head of everything»; in the era of Kazakhstan’s formation that formula shifted slightly. The banknotes are also a return to history, a bow to the eras preceding the Kazakh SSR: to Orda and to Alash.

Object

Cap «QOLMA QOL». A cap with a patch in the form of an old banknote and a debt table on the side, a combination of a historical image and an industrial aesthetic. At the center, a print stylized after a vintage Kazakhstani bill, as a symbol of memory, value, and cultural code. On the side, a spare «debt table» that adds a conceptual accent and a reference to financial themes.

We released it in three colors, with three different banknotes and, accordingly, three Kazakh historical figures:

• Шокан Валиханов
• Абай Кунанбаев
• Абылай-хан

Each version is a separate story, bringing together heritage, national identity, and contemporary design.