religions Article Ritual, Ritualization, and Religion in the Work of Kazakhstani Artist Anvar Musrepov Emina Yessekeyeva 1,2, * and Eric Venbrux 1   Citation: Yessekeyeva, Emina, and Eric Venbrux. 2021. Ritual, Ritualization, and Religion in the Work of Kazakhstani Artist Anvar Musrepov. Religions 12: 892. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12100892 Academic Editor: Enzo Pace Received: 30 August 2021 Accepted: 11 October 2021 Published: 18 October 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. 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/). 1 Department of Religious and Cultural Studies, Faculty of Philosophy and Political Science, Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, Almaty 050040, Kazakhstan; eric.venbrux@ru.nl 2 Department of Comparative Religion, Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies, Radboud University, Erasmusplein 1, 6525 HT Nijmegen, The Netherlands * Correspondence: aminayesekeyeva@gmail.com or emina.yessekeyeva@ru.nl Abstract: This article contributes to the study of ritual in art, which is an unconventional setting for ritual studies. It concerns ritual, ritualization, and religion in the oeuvre of the up-and-coming Kazakhstani artist Anvar Musrepov. We discuss the prayer ritual, the process of ritual erasure (by covering in black), consumption rituals, and a cleansing ritual with a drone and ritualization with computer-generated imagery. Musrepov seeks to reimagine Kazakhstani national identity. His art, we argue, draws on what Alfred Gell has called the technology of enchantment. Keywords: Anvar Musrepov; Kazakhstan; art; prayer ritual; ritual erasure; consumption ritual; cyberritual; technology of enchantment 1. Introduction Anvar Musrepov (born in 1994) is one of the most fascinating and imaginative young artists of Kazakhstan. In this article, we focus on his works of art that have ritual as their theme and/or show the process of ritualizing. We ask what the perspective of ritual studies can contribute to an understanding of his art-making, and vice versa, how Musrepov’s art might help to improve our grasp of ritual and ritualizing. Following ritual studies scholar Ronald Grimes, this study is about ritual ‘out of place’; the appearance of the phenomenon outside the conventional settings in the study of ritual (Grimes 2006). We are concerned with the relationship between ritual and art. “The historical dis- course of art as a cultural phenomenon is dense with ritual,” according to Townsend-Gault (1992, p. 52). Dissanayke (1979, pp. 27–31; also see, Dissanayke 1988, 1995, 2000) argues that ritual and art were closely related throughout human evolution. Harrison (1913) contends that “art arises from ritual”. Grimes (2000, p. 75) writes that art and ritual con- nect domains “that Western adulthood has taught us to sever”. As Ashley (1992, p. 10) notes, “The relation between them is not unidirectional (art used in ritual) but reciprocal; ritual creates its artworks while art or architecture enables ritual activity”. Musrepov’s interactive artwork Namaz Maker on the Muslim ritual of prayer, as we will see in the next section, is a case in point. Regarding art and ritual, Gell (1989, 1998; see also, Tuzin 2002) speaks of a “technology of enchantment”; we will come back to this notion. We will also discuss Musrepov’s work in relation to what Freeland (2001, pp. 3, 1–8) has called the “ritual theory” of art or the “theory of art as ritual”. However, Musrepov is not the only artist from Kazakhstan working with ritual as a theme. Other artists, such as Said Atabekov (Yessekeyeva and Venbrux 2021), Kanat Ibragimov, Yerbosyn Meldibekov, and Almagul Menlibayeva (Sorokina 2016a), also need to be mentioned. The latter, according to Sorokina (Sorokina 2016a, p. 248), is “one of the few women in the region who deal with video seriously.” We have a further publication on the work of Almagul Menlibayeva in preparation. Religions 2021, 12, 892. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12100892 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions