Brand was nominated for the Asia Pacific Breweries Foundation Signature Art Prize 2018, where it was selected as a finalist. Meldibekov was trained as a sculptor during the Soviet regime, learning how to create busts of Lenin in art school. By the time of his graduation, however, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist, and, with its collapse, gone too were his dreams of a career within the established socialist system of art production. He would instead, as an artist, turn his attention to a critical examination of the legacy of Soviet visuality and traditional Kazakh culture, in the era of the free market. Brand is a series of wall panels crafted from the leather of the grunting ox, a species native to the highlands of Central Asia. The practice of branding cattle, which is an age-old custom among the nomadic communities of the region, was modernized during the Soviet period; the convention of marking animals with the coats-of-arms of their owners was superseded by the use of numbers. The work, then, juxtaposes two seemingly simple techniques – the use of natural materials characteristic of Central Asia, and the iconography of numeric symbols, the abstraction and seriality of which appears in the work of contemporary artists such as On Kawara and Roman Opalka. At the same time, Brand also bears less savoury connotations. As the artist remarks: “Ten years ago I met an old man in Berlin. His hands were covered with deformed scars, consisting of digits. It struck me that the numbers were tattooed by the Nazis when he was much younger. When I saw these large deformed scars on the hides … I instantly recalled that old man.”
