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<\/p>\n\n\tKazakhstan\u2019s newly opened Tselinny Center\u00a0of Contemporary Culture\u00a0offers a guide to decolonization, and it goes something like this: Remember, rethink, advance, dance. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThese steps were put into practice in September, when a collective of Kazakh visual artists, musicians, poets, and singers, adorned in feathers and sumptuous fabrics, gathered in the center\u2019s cavernous forum to summon the Aral Sea. The once-vast saline lake was systematically drained in the latter half of the 20th century, when the region was colonized by the Soviet Union. Today,\u00a0it is a salty depression in\u00a0the heart of Central Asia. \u00a0<\/p>\n
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\n\t\u201cAs descendants of the people who first witnessed the signs of the sea\u2019s disappearance, we, contemporary Central Asians, have to deal with what is left in the wake of this catastrophe,\u201d reads an artist statement from Diana T. Kudaibergen, a cultural and political sociologist, and a member of the creative advisory board that serves Tselinny in place of a head curator. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThe performance, titled Barsakelmes, took its name from an island,\u00a0once the largest in the Aral Sea, which grew rumors of a temporal vortex amid the Soviet irrigation project. The title translates from the\u00a0Kazakh language to \u201cIf one goes there, one won\u2019t return.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tPerhaps that\u2019s why Barsakelmes\u00a0opened programming.\u00a0From its history to artistic strategy, to the building it now occupies, the Tselinny Center\u00a0of Contemporary Culture embodies the inverse message: Learn and live. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tBarsakelmes reinterpreted the legend of Nurtole, a Central Plains hero who tamed a terror of snakes and dragons with his sacred kobyz, an ancient Turkic bowed string instrument. The legend ends with Nurtole chaining evil\u00a0beneath the water of an unnamed sea; his lullaby becomes eternal ocean noise. Barsakelmes asks: What if those mystic waters were the Aral? In the performance, the beasts, having been starved of song and mutated by the nuclear tests\u00a0conducted by Soviets in the region,\u00a0reemerged as a sociopolitical monster of a problem. Folk songs alone can\u2019t soothe a modern state, so the participants brought a synthesizer. \u00a0<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\tBARSAKELMES performance, September 6-7 2025, Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture, Almaty.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto: Nurtas Sisekenov<\/p>\n
\n\tThe audience was a mix of local and international arts patrons, professionals, and journalists, seated in a half-circle around a monumental multi-colored yurt by Berlin-based Kazakh visual artist Gulnur Mukazhanova, with additional visuals by Darya Temirkhan. The installation was like the Barsakelmes of legend: a\u00a0manmade portal to the spiritual plane. Whirling dancers wrapped in white linen passed in and out, drawn by salt lines on the floor. A traditional throat singer sang of families torn apart, according to an attendee fluent in the language.\u00a0Late into its 90-minute\u00a0running time, horses charged in\u2014or maybe that was the sound of drums.<\/p>\n
\n\tIt\u2019s difficult in 2025 to anticipate a somatic purge of such power unfolding in a major Western museum, or at least those that operate comfortably under capitalism. I think that\u2019s partly because decolonization requires a public memory\u2014what happened to whom, and what all that meant\u2014that is honest and therefore worth fighting for. Barsakelmes was a call to refuse comfort from systems designed to decimate the spirit.\u00a0It urged its viewers to examine the most painful parts of history, to choose a path that foregrounds Indigeneity. Grieve loss, rather than intellectualize it. Accept that the Aral Sea is gone, but find that within the shallow pools reforming in its basin,\u00a0fish still swim. \u00a0
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Kazakhstan gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. (Uzbekistan,\u00a0which opened its first international biennial in September, was liberated that same year.) That\u2019s 30-odd years to begin to come to terms with the traumatic recontextualization of Central Asian history\u2014including its visual and performing arts tradition. The first generation of Kazakh contemporary artists to emerge post-USSR inherited an epochal to-do list: Break from propagandistic aesthetics, reestablish a Kazakh artistic language, re-forge connections between Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tHere enters the Tselinny Center\u00a0of Contemporary Culture. It was founded in 2018 by the\u00a0Kazakh businessman and entrepreneur Kairat Boranbayev as the nation\u2019s first private cultural institution and until now operated under the name Tselinny Temporary.\u00a0<\/p>\n