religions Article Being in Cosmos: Sergei Dykov’s Visual Exploration of the Spirit of Altai Andrzej Rozwadowski   Citation: Rozwadowski, Andrzej. 2021. Being in Cosmos: Sergei Dykov’s Visual Exploration of the Spirit of Altai. Religions 12: 405. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12060405 Academic Editor: Thomas Michael Received: 3 April 2021 Accepted: 28 May 2021 Published: 31 May 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). Faculty of Archaeology, Adam Mickiewicz University, ul. Uniwersytetu Pozna´ nskiego 7, 61-712 Pozna ´ n, Poland; rozw@amu.edu.pl Abstract: This article focuses on how shamanism and animism, two important features of Altaic ontology, can be expressed in art. This is discussed by exploring the art of Sergei Dykov, a contempo- rary Altaic (south Siberian) visual artist, whose art is part of a wider trend in modern Siberian art of rediscovering the conceptual potentials of indigenous Siberian values. Dykov is one of those artists whose fascination with Siberian culture is not limited to formal inspirations but who also seeks how to express these indigenous values in contemporary art forms. Drawing on Altaic folklore, its myths and beliefs, including shamanism, as well as ancient Siberian art forms, Dykov searches for a new visual language capable of expressing the Altaic perception of the world. For him, therefore, painting is significantly an intellectual project involving an attempt to understand the indigenous ontology of being in the world. The key concepts around which his art revolves are thus human-animal transformations, human and non-human beings’ relations, and the interconnectedness of the visible and nonvisible. The study was based on an analysis of a sample of his unpublished artworks. Keywords: Altai/Siberia; contemporary art; heritage; shamanism/animism; Sergei Dykov 1. Introduction The past and tradition are important aspects that shape modern perceptions of Siberia, and they are also significant in ongoing cultural processes. One of these processes concerns contemporary art in Siberia which, over the last two to three decades, has found new sources of inspiration in Siberia’s past and the indigenous culture of the region. The religious legacy of indigenous Siberian peoples, with prehistoric and historic material culture being part of this heritage, has become one of the major inspirations for some of the artists in the region (Kichigina 2007; Nevolko 2011; Korobeinikova 2012; Chirkov 2013; Shishin 2015; Churilov 2017; Rozwadowski and Boniec forthcoming). It has manifested particularly strongly in southern Siberia, where this artistic journey, following the cues of the past and tradition, has also inspired exhibition projects, which additionally united artists who shared a common passion for the spiritual legacy of Siberia. The first of these was a series of exhibitions entitled “Trace”, initiated in 2000. In the following years new projects appeared: “Perpetumm Mobile” (2010), “Chronotop” (2011), and “Siberian Neoarchaic” (2013–2014) (Chirkov and Galygina 2011; Chuiko 2006; Galygina 2010, 2011, 2012, 2015). Interestingly, artists exploring Siberia’s past and traditions are of indigenous as well as non-indigenous Siberian ancestry, the latter being most often of Russian–Slavic origins. This artistic trend of exploring native Siberian culture has not, therefore, been a burst of indigenous identity, as was the case, for example, in Canada in the second half of the 20th century, where the past and tradition became the subjects of art drawn upon exclusively by First Nations artists (Sinclair and Pollock 1979; McLuhan and Hill 1984; Southcott 1985). Furthermore, the very term “indigenous” has more than one meaning in Siberia. In addition to its most common use to describe individuals “whose familial ancestors have always, as far as is known, inhabited the specific places that their present-day descendants still Religions 2021, 12, 405. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12060405 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions