REPORT FROM CENTRAL ASIA Video Comes to the 'StansA lively video festival in Almaty, Kazakhstan, has helped fuel the rapid To the Western art world, Central Asia might seem the Last Mystery. Since the 1989 exhi bition "Magiciens de la Terre," we have seen work from throughout Africa , Latin America and Asia , but we know nothing of the vast and his toric steppes of Central Asia . For the purposes of this article, Central Asia means primarily the five Central Asian Republics which once were parts of the Soviet Union : Turkmenistan , Kazakhstan , Kyrgystan , Uzbekistan and Tajikistan . Topographi cally, the area is most associated with the steppe; Kazakhstan is 90 percent steppe, meaning a near-desert growing primarily grasses about a foot and a half high, autumnally yellowing when I saw them. On these vast, arid expanses, the nomadic Turkic, Mongol and mixed Turko-Mongol peoples roamed in their seasonal migrations, following the new grasses on which the herds have fed for thousands of years. But Central Asia is also mountains; Kyrgystan is 93 percent mountainous, comprising especially the Tien Shan range. Often reaching 23,000 feet, this range is nearly as lofty as the high Himalayas , which lie off the Tien Shan 's southern end. Central Asia is also, sometimes, the crystal clear mountain la ke, like Lake Issyk Kul in northeast Kyrgystan, wh ich has been described as a piece of springtime sky which fell to Earth. In the Issyk Kul region, Tamer lane had a headquarters, and Genghis Khan is said to have been buried there—in an unknown loc ation. All these features — steppe, mountain and lake - are immense, profound and beautiful, characte rized by a severe sense of distance and often lon eliness. In his novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years (1980) the prominent Kyrgyz writ er Chingiz Aitmatov wrote: "The steppe is vast and man is small. The steppe takes no sides… You have to take the steppe as it is." (1) I recently had the opportunity to investigate mystery when I was invited to participate in an international jury for a Central Asian festival of video art at the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Almaty , Kazakhstan . The festival/competi tion, organized by Valeria Ibraeva, the Kazakh director of the Soros Center Almaty, took place Oct. 19-21, 2004 , in Almaty's German Theater, a modest but venerable building in the middle of a pleas ant garden. The other jurors were artist Saken Narynov, Kazakhstan; Oleg Karpov, director of the Cinema Museum in Tashkent, Uzbekistan; Parviz Kurbanov, film director, Tajikistan; Furkat Tursunov, film director, Kyrgystan; and Charles Esche, director of the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, Holland, and co-curator of the Istanbul Biennale coming up in September. The festival/competition was advertised throughout the 'Stans, as the five republics have been called. Anyone could apply, whether they had previous expe rience in the medium or not. It was one of Ibraeva's aims to expose more artists to the medium of video. Fifty-three artists were selected by a committee; some were given modest budgets and lent video cameras. Subsequently, Ibraeva and the committee chose 38 works by 38 artists or artist teams from Uzbekistan , Tajikistan , Kazakhstan and Kyrgystan, for the deliberations of the jury. The $2,500 in prize money (divided into first, second, third and fourth prizes) may not be large by U.S. standards, but in the local context it was a significant sum. The theme of the festival was indicated by its title: "Videoidentity: Sacred Places of Central Asia." To a Western art audience, "sacred places" might seem like a worn-out theme, but underly ing the festival were two purposes which make sense of this decision. First, Ibraeva hoped, by introducing video art to a part of the world where it was not yet an established medium (some of the artists had never held a video camera before), to bring Central Asian art into the present and future, to open a way for it into the international discourse. Painting and sculpture were the leading arts of the Soviet era, and this festival was a distinct ly post-Soviet development. Indeed, with impressive entries and full houses for the screenings, the festival was so successful that it probably will create a surge of new work in this medium throughout the 'Stans. Secondly, the festival sought, by focusing attention on the region's traditional places through a new medium, to reintroduce Central Asia to itself and to the rest of the world. What emerged was a picture of a 1,000-year-long tradition of multicultural and interreligious coex istence. Although the societies of Central Asia are, today, predominantly Islamic, most of them are secularized and on the way to Westernization. No particular approach to Central Asian ident ity was mandated, so the artists felt free to make their works on any principle they liked. This sense of freedom seemed appropriate. From one point of view, all of nature is a sacred place; from another (perhaps Hegelian), all of culture is a sacred place; from an animistic viewpoint, every place is a sacred place. Westerners don't often encounter animism, except in books about the history of reli gion, but Kazakhstan and Kyrgystan are diverse religious regions. In some steppe and mountain villages, Islam coexists with a traditional panthe ism of a more or less Paleolithic origin. Elsewhere, remnants of Zoroastrianism coexist with some cemeteries that have Russian Orthodox crosses on the graves. Manicheanism, though much reduced, is still practiced, as is a Sufi form of Islam. There's also a sense of animism, wherein a particular tree beside a stream might constitute a sacred place. Outside the cities many shamanistic practices still survive, some of which formed the subject matter of video works in the competition. The range of responses to the "sacred places" theme was as wide as the region's spectrum of religious practices. Some artists were playful in their approach to the subject, not unlike the Western artists in "One Hundred Artists See God," a recent traveling show curated by John Baldessari and Meg Cranston. Others followed the title liter ally, as in Kazakh artist Rafael Slekenov's The Sufi Land, which documents such things as pilgrimages and shamanic tribal practices. In some cases, the theme was stretched to include secular applica tions. Aral Haiku by Alexander Ugai ( Kazakhstan ) and The Pit by Alla Girik and Oksana Shatalova (Kazakhstan) focus in a Socialist Realist way (with echoes of Sergei Eisenstein) on societal and eco logical problems—in the one case the desiccation of the Aral Sea through a failed irrigation project, in the other the relationship of mutual sacrifice between the city of Rudny and a hideous-looking quarry in the middle of town. Rudny seems to be digging, as one audience member said, "into the bowels of the earth," but with attendant ruin, as if a dangerous old goddess had reawakened. A three-way collaboration by Olga Makeeva, Konstantin Timoshenko and Zaur Mansurov, Spoiled Towers is a humorous reflection on the fact that there are small-scale replicas of the Eiffel Tower in three Central Asian capitals (Bishkek, Tashkent and Almaty). Do they sanctify the places in which they occur, the film asks, or do they desecrate them? And what do these recently built replicas say about the post-Soviet Westernizing trend? The multi layered religious history of the 'Stans informed many videos. Sham, by Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Dzhumaliev (Kyrgystan), portrays a mixture of Islam and paganism through edited footage of shamanic and other ancient rites that still take place in Kyrgystan's Kochkor Valley . Almagul Menlibaeva, who lives in both Amsterdam and Almaty, contributed three works, all strikingly alike in style. Two of the three pieces, Steppenbaroque (2003) and Jihad (2004), focus on elaborately choreographed ritualist actions per formed by women in flowing, colorful costumes, elements also present in her third work, Chasing Sheep (2004). As well as deliberately invoking archaic spiritual practices—there are Neolithic overtones of likening the woman's body to the cur vatures of landscape and acknowledging the sea sonal cycle by continual robing and disrobing—the works seem to deliberately place Menlibaeva in a modern tradition of visionary women filmmak ers that includes Maya Deren and Shirin Neshat. Menlibaeva's videos were the most polished of the works in the festival. Steppenbaroque shared third prize with Aral Haiku and Sham. Stones by Vladimir Khan ( Kazakhstan ) — at 40 minutes the longest piece in the festival — is a pan theistic tour of nature (especially anything having to do with water) that while extremely relaxed is yet infused with a sense of urgent meaning. The camera pans continuously over stones and foliage in a watery landscape that seems lush and full. The jury awarded it second prize. First prize went to Said Atabekov's Noah's Ark, a film about an ancient procession that is an exercise in primitivist surrealism. Bio-Toilet, by Maxim and Valery Zadarnovsky ( Kazakhstan ), is a lively psychedelic vision of the body. In an unspecified site, priest-scientists submit a human body to some kind of inspection. The camera seems to move in and out of the body in bursts of kaleidoscopic color. It evokes a genre of the avant-garde film tradition defined by Stan van der Beek and Scott Bartlett, among oth ers. Bio-Toilet was praised by the jury but squeezed out for a prize. The range and expressiveness of the video works were impressive, especially since many or even most of the artists had little or no familiarity with prior video art. From their point of view, even the Istanbul Biennale seems like the end of the earth. It was as if, prompted and enabled by Ibraeva and her fine staff, they had engaged in an adventure of discovery. The audience, comprising many of the artists, their friends and collaborators, and members of the public, seemed fascinated and appreciative of the festival. About 100 people filled the German Theater and, in between viewing ses sions, discussed the works more openly and outspokenly than a Western audience would have. Some people were upset about flippant approaches to the sacred, as in Bio-Tbilet, or seemingly negative approaches, as in Pit and Aral Haiku, where the secular aggressively confronts the sacred. There were also objections to the lack of narrativity and the sometimes psychedelic visual effects that replaced it. Still, the audience was mostly happy with the event and frequently laughed, clapped and, at the end, when Furkat Tursunov of Kyrgystan announced the six prizewinners, cheered. There was a sense of warm appreciation for the accomplishment of the artists and for their contributions to the dialogue about national identity after the long Soviet period, during which one thing clearly unavailable was freedom of expression. A theme that recurred several times in these discussions was the question: What is video art? Several speakers raised it with a certain perplexity, as did local TV interviewers covering the festival. Perhaps this isn't surprising, given that the Central Asian Republics were not involved in a tradition of avant-garde cinema that goes back to the Surrealist era and leads directly to video art. Still, from what I saw in Almaty, it seems that video is becoming a leading medium of the post-Soviet era. Untainted by any prior association with propaganda, this immediacy-loving medium makes it easier to burst free of imposed archetypes. After the three days of the festival, the delegations of artists began to disperse and head for home. The Uzbeki artists got into a minivan and set out. When the Kyrgyz artists did the same, I went with them. For several days I explored the art muse ums of Bishkek and, after a trip up the mountains, the area of Lake Issyk Kul. What came through everywhere was the challenge of making the transition from the Soviet era to something not yet defined. While racing up the Chu Valley toward Boom Gorge, with Issyk Kul beyond, one sees statues from the Soviet era set up on the hills on both sides of the road. Realist sculptures in an illustrational vein, some showing happy workers, others, a variety of wildlife, suggest a closeness of human society with nature. The statues are all painted either white or silver and have no flavor of any particular culture or region. In the State Museum of Fine Arts in Bishkek it is possible to retrace the fate of art under Communist rule. There is a pleasant enough collection of 19 th - century Russian landscape paintings - interspersed with some copies of famous paintings, a practice common in Western museums, too, in the 19th cen tury. Then there is the 20th-century room. The art on view is primarily what can be called faux modernist kitsch, work that imitates the style of genuine modernist art but never rises above being an unintentional send-up of its model. The creators of such work tend to be official artists from the late Soviet era whose biographies typically feature graduating from the Kyrgyz State Art College and joining the Artists' Union of the Kyrgyz Republic in the 1970s or '80s. Some of these artists bear honorary titles conferred in the Soviet era that sound almost like parodies of it: "Honored Art Worker of the Kyrgyz Republic," or "Meritorious Cultural Worker of the Kyrgyz Republic." In Kazakhstan there already seems to be a switch going on from painting to video. Many younger artists also create installations, often involving found ethnographic objects. Even some of the former official artists have switched to the new modes. The shift seems to derive in part from one artist, a seminal figure named Ziyakhan Shaigeldinov, who called himself Shai Ziya . During the Soviet years and after, this daring outsider practiced late-modernist and post modernist art styles confrontationally in the streets. In a typical event, Ziya would unload Pop-inspired sculptures from his car into the middle of an inters ection. When drivers complained, he was reported to shout: "This is modern art. You can't avoid it. You can't get away from it. It's coming." When the police arrived, he would shift into a questioning mode, asking them: "Why should art always be in a museum? Why shouldn't I say whatever I want?" His personal crusade came to an abrupt end in 2000 when he hanged himself at the age of 52. For a period of a decade or two, starting in the 1960s, the division between official and unofficial art was intensely felt in Soviet society. As the USSR c ollapsed, unofficial art, by artists who might or might not be in the artists' union, became more and more common, with brief exhibitions in artists' homes or other private venues. Now, the situation is very different, as exemplified by the Soros video festival, an event with open competition and open discussion and all results announced by a panel that was chosen with diversity in mind. Back in Bishkek, after diving into the icy waters of Issyk Kul, I sat in the studio of Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Dzhumaliev, a space that they had converted to a kind of office-headquarters for an organization started three years earlier called ArtEast. ArtEast has no regular support but has been awarded two foundation grants for specific projects. A modest grant from the Soros Foundation three years ago set the stage for a team of artists from Bishkek to travel to Siberia and make works based on their experiences there. The work the Kyrgyz team did in the Trans- Baikal region of Siberia comprised mostly video and installation art of an anthropologi cal bent. In one work, Kasmalieva is seen in ancient costume weaving wool. In another, massive kettles used by local shamans were filmed in an installationlike arrangement. Such works seemed to embody the approach that scholars George Marcus and Michael Fisher term "anthropology as cultural critique," which involves regarding one's own culture as would a stranger from outside. It is as if the Kyrgyz artists in Siberia were performing a cultur al critique on themselves through anthropological researches into their own origins. (The Turkic peoples who came to dominance from Turkey to Siberia, including most of Central Asia , are believed to have migrated from the region of Siberia that includes Lake Baikal and the Yenisei River.) As the tenth day of my visit to Central Asia arrived I found myself in a tiny village high in the Tien Shan range of Kyrgystan, where I and Murat, who had kindly driven me through the mountains, had stayed the night with the parents of a friend of his from Bishkek. The village had no plumbing and no phones (though electricity and TV were abundant); if you stepped out of the house at night, you might bump into a donkey or goat strolling in the darkness. The next morning we were off, racing down the hill at dawn among the Socialist Realist statues. Thirty-five consecutive hours of traveling (includ ing waiting times in between flights) brought me to Kennedy Airport, back to the air-conditioned nightmare, as Henry Miller once called America, which was at the moment darkening as the shadow of an ominous election swept the landscape. The range of responses to the festival's "sacred places" (1.) Chingiz Aitmatov, The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, English translation by John French, Boston and Moscow, The International Academy of Sciences, Industry, Education and the Arts (USA) and Institute of World Literature, Academy of Sciences of the Russian Federation, 2000, p.17. The works in "Videoidentity: Sacred Places of Central Asia " were screened Oct. 19-21, 2004 , in Almaty , Kazakhstan . The festival was organized by the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Almaty, under the direc tion of Valeria Ibraeva. By Thomas McEvilley обратноenglishНовости Архив
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