Ear Graffiti
As an urban explorer, I've done my best to document the various kinds of graffiti in Almaty: stencil graffiti, romantic graffiti, even children's graffiti and advertising graffiti. Yet there's only work of street art that I thought deserved a treatment all of its own - the omnipresent ears of Almaty. Last summer, when I first started walking, I picked up on this installation pretty quick: stylized ears, sometimes one, sometimes two, in psychedelic colors, usually on fresh walls. Some stencils had some fairly extensive reach, and I've seen some taggers, like Repas, all over town. But the ears...the ears are all over the place! And more important than just quantity is their impressive consistency, the ceaseless experimentation with color, their clever placement.
I wondered who was behind them. The ears would be sometimes accompanied by text: ukho [ухо], which means "ear", and the letters CAS. After some Googling, I finally discovered that the ear painter was a 19 year old kid named Pavel Rodulgin, or as he prefers to be called, Pasha Cas. With his ear project, this young visionary became to most famous street artist in Kazakhstan. His ears, which he also put up in Russia and Uzbekistan while traveling, were part of a project he called "The Walls Have Ears" [У стен есть уши; u sten yest ushi]. Pasha says that the meaning of the project is up for interpretation, but one could interpret the ears as a metaphor for the surveillance state, or as I would prefer, as an attempt to anthropomorphize a built landscape that is taken for granted.
Pasha started the ear project when he was 17, but he's since grown up and worked on some provocative installations. He hung a lynched dummy from a billboard with the text Vsem pokh [Всем пох], or "Nobody gives a fuck", a comment on the quiet crisis of teen suicide in Kazakhstan. In front of the Almaty akimat, or city hall, he hung a clothesline of giant underpants, each spray painted with one letter to spell out "Year of Culture," mocking the city government's stodgy attempts at supporting the arts. In another action, he went into stores and stuck stickers on bottles of booze that read "Alcohol makes you scum" and "Don't drink today."
I've mapped all the ears of Almaty that I can find. If you find some more and take some pictures, I'll add them to the map!
I wondered who was behind them. The ears would be sometimes accompanied by text: ukho [ухо], which means "ear", and the letters CAS. After some Googling, I finally discovered that the ear painter was a 19 year old kid named Pavel Rodulgin, or as he prefers to be called, Pasha Cas. With his ear project, this young visionary became to most famous street artist in Kazakhstan. His ears, which he also put up in Russia and Uzbekistan while traveling, were part of a project he called "The Walls Have Ears" [У стен есть уши; u sten yest ushi]. Pasha says that the meaning of the project is up for interpretation, but one could interpret the ears as a metaphor for the surveillance state, or as I would prefer, as an attempt to anthropomorphize a built landscape that is taken for granted.
Pasha started the ear project when he was 17, but he's since grown up and worked on some provocative installations. He hung a lynched dummy from a billboard with the text Vsem pokh [Всем пох], or "Nobody gives a fuck", a comment on the quiet crisis of teen suicide in Kazakhstan. In front of the Almaty akimat, or city hall, he hung a clothesline of giant underpants, each spray painted with one letter to spell out "Year of Culture," mocking the city government's stodgy attempts at supporting the arts. In another action, he went into stores and stuck stickers on bottles of booze that read "Alcohol makes you scum" and "Don't drink today."
I've mapped all the ears of Almaty that I can find. If you find some more and take some pictures, I'll add them to the map!
View Ear Graffiti in a larger map
