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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
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 others. Bio-Toilet was praised by the jury but squeezed out for a prize.
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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 sessions, 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-Toilet, 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 museums 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.
