Phantom Stories

Ulan Djaparov, Saodat Ismailova, Alexander Ugay, Elena and Viktor Vorobyev

Should we agree with those who say that “modernity” was always flawed (because it was built on the exploitation of nature by humankind, of most of the world by a small part of it and of the many by the few) and was always going end in disaster? Should we therefore reject the excesses of the visionary 20th century and “demodernize” for the sake of a better, more progressive future?

Or should we, instead, treasure all that can be salvaged from the compromised tradition of modernity (including modernization and modernism, with their colonial applications, but also liberal freedoms and rights) and continue to follow its basic recipes for a world order that has, after all, delivered a measure of security and prosperity to many parts of the world?

Choosing the right roadmap to avoid societal or ecological collapse is urgent everywhere, not least in the region that the two curators of this exhibition, Anders Kreuger and Yuliya Sorokina, have chosen to call “Post-Soviet Asia”. This is a less ethnographic and more geopolitical way of saying “Central Asia”. The “stan countries” that emerged on the political map in 1991 are still marked by the most momentous event of that year: the demise of the USSR and of a system that had, for decades, been promoted as a viable alternative to global capitalism.

Post-Soviet Asia appears to be squeezed between a non-Western past (marked by the nomadic, at times politically expansive culture of the Turkic peoples, but also by Islam) and a non-Western future (if an increasingly assertive China can be described in such terms). Whether the intervening experience of colonization by Imperial Russia and Soviet Power should be labeled “Western” is an open question.

Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, from which the artists in this exhibition come, are building new hybrid cultural identities for themselves. The countries differ from each other politically, economically and historically, but they share the predicament of being uneasily poised between versions of modernity “offered” to them by others (mainly the Russians, the Chinese and the Americans, but also the Turks) and “national ideas” about how to move forward.

This exhibition of lens-based work (various forms of photography and video) explores this sense of unease, of being fundamentally unsure about whether the change one experiences is for better or worse, which is inextricably associated with the still unfolding crisis of modernity.

One strategy is trying to hold on to the tradition of enlightenment by insisting on making the obscure (or the half-illuminated) visible, whether metaphorically in Elena and Viktor Vorobyev’s readings of visual patterns in everyday environments (such as hand-written signs interpreting street reality or the sunrise- or sunset-shaped window grills that were ubiquitous in the Soviet Empire) or literally in Alexander Ugay’s “obscurations” (installations based on site-specific pinhole photography) or his re-photographed reverses of photographic documents from the Stalinist prison camps.

Another strategy is to eschew artistic investigation (with its hybridization of positivism and poetry) and instead abandon oneself to impulses that, in their apparent silliness, become visual emblems of societal ambiguity, as when Ulan Djaparov stages a performance of latter-day bodhisattvas in the corridor of a Russian sleeper train.

Yet another strategy is to stage audio-visual excursions (or excavations) into a past that might mirror a future, as when Saodat Ismailova resurrects the extinct Turan tiger in a film that adds new layers (ambient sound design, a voice-over in Uzbek, subtitles in English) to an already layered story of loss and longing.

The exhibition title is borrowed from a photographic series by Elena and Viktor Vorobyev: interiors views of their house in Almaty, now demolished, seen as reflections in the switched-off screen of an old television set, which in itself is a representative of outdated modernity.

Phantom Stories: Leitmotifs of Post-Soviet Asia sketches a portrait of a region that keeps getting entangled in the “Great Game” between powerful others but is also often overlooked. Yet what the exhibition is really “about”—its leitmotif, in other words—is the elusive but decisive role of artistic agency for our understanding of the world in its obscurity and clarity.

Lunds konsthall thanks the artists for their works and the excellent collaboration. A special thanks to Yuliya Sorokina, curator and art historian from Almaty, who took time, at short notice, to engage for this project. Many thanks also to Aspan Gallery in Almaty for its generous support.