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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
Art in America, Dec, 2005 by Thomas McEvilley
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 literally, 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 applications. 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 ecological 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.
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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 performed 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 curvatures of landscape and acknowledging the seasonal cycle by continual robing and disrobing--the works seem to deliberately place Menlibaeva in a modern tradition of visionary women filmmakers 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 pantheistic 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.
