Video comes to the 'Stans: a lively video festival in Almaty, Kazakhstan, has helped fuel the rapid spread of the medium across the republics of Central Asia

To the Western art world, Central Asia might seem the Last Mystery. Since the 1989 exhibition "Magiciens de la Terre," we have seen work from throughout Africa, Latin America and Asia, but we know nothing of the vast and historic 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. Topographically, 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, and 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 lake, like Lake Issyk Kul in northeast Kyrgystan, which has been described as a piece of springtime sky which fell to Earth. In the Issyk Kul region, Tamerlane had a headquarters, and Genghis Khan is said to have been buried there--in an unknown location. All these features--steppe, mountain and lake--are immense, profound and beautiful, characterized by a severe sense of distance and often loneliness. In his novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years (1980) the prominent Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Altmatov 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 this 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/competition, 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 pleasant 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 'Starts, as the five republics have been called. Anyone could apply, whether they had previous experience 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 underlying 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 distinctly 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 coexistence. 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 identity 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 religion, but Kazakhstan and Kyrgystan are diverse religious regions. In some steppe and mountain villages, Islam coexists with a traditional pantheism 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.