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

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 cultural 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 (including 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 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 direction of Valeria Ibraeva.

(1.) Chingiz Aitmatov, The Day Lasts Mare 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.

Thomas McEvilley's latest book is The Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post Modernism (McPherson & Company, 2005).

COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group