This is a continuation of Laboratories of Friendship, Part 2: Power Vertical.
Our DNA
From Bukhara, I returned to Tashkent to take a flight to Almaty. I had been invited to cover the opening of the Tselinny Center for Contemporary Culture, which was timed to coincide with that of the Almaty Museum of Arts (ALMA). Both ALMA and Tselinny are founded by wealthy businessmen, each worth close to $1 billion on paper: auto tycoon Nurlan Smagulov (ALMA), and oil & gas purveyor Kairat Boranbayev (Tselinny). Both founders play a prominent and public role in their respective institutions, and had a major impact on defining their ideology and architectural form. Although the level of credit afforded to each of these businessmen seemed, at first glance, like an all-too-naked display of deference to their oligarchic munificence, in reality, hierarchy made itself felt in a more nuanced way during the opening events. Nurlan and Kairat were both referred to by their first names; they mingled with visitors and their employees, cracked jokes and had jokes cracked at them, and responded to difficult questions without evident offense. They relished in the limelight but did not hog it; and, in distinction to the modus operandi of oligarchs like Roman Abramovich or Leonid Mikhelson, they did not seek shelter in the shadows.
Smagulov, the founder of ALMA, cut an eccentric, dandy-like figure, dressed in a double-breasted suit, scarlet bow tie and blood-red papal socks, topped off by a beige trilby. Asked to define the mission of his institution by a journalist, Smagulov invoked, without missing a beat, the language of Stalinist nationalist policy. Kazakhstan, he said, has long been a “big laboratory of Friendship”—and the new museum seeks to carry out this kind of philial laboratory function, too. But whence did all these “Friends” come to Kazakhstan, and on what basis? As Smagulov acknowledged, they arrived first as agricultural settler-colonialists under the Russian Empire, and later as forced deportees, victims of Stalin’s campaign of social engineering and genocide through population transfer—Koreans from the Russian Far East, Chechens and Crimean Tatars from their homelands, Poles from Ukraine and Belarus, Germans from the Volga Region, Soviet dissidents and many others. “All these cultures,” Smagulov says, “have become part of our DNA.”
In response to this conjuncture, the first permanent exhibition of ALMA’s collection is held, on the initiative of the chief curator, the Latvian-born Inga Lāce, under the heading of “Qonaqtar,” a word meaning “guest” in Kazakh. In the catalog, Lāce frames the exhibition as a critical exploration of “hospitality”—a concept that is often associated, although often in an essentialist, exoticizing key, with Kazakh and Central Asian culture. In distinction to Smagulov’s rosy portrayal of Friendship, “Qonaqtar,” however, claims to show hospitality in “all its complexities,” as both “care and control, generosity and power.” Guests “can come in many guises, and hospitality is not always voluntary,” Lāce writes.1 Pride of place in the show is afforded to the 1978 painting Friendship by Aisha Galymbaeva, depicting an idealized interaction between a Kazakh woman and a group of African women, all in national dress, during the Almaty Afro-Asian Writers’ Congress of 1973.
The architecture of ALMA mimics the deconstructivist juttiness of iconic museum buildings by Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry from the 1990s and 2000s, albeit adapted to the local context. (Smagulov confirmed that Bilbao’s Guggenheim and Rome’s MAXXI were his primary inspiration, and that he hopes ALMA will replicate the “Bilbao effect” in Almaty.) Prominently positioned at the intersection of Nazarbayev and Al-Farabi Avenues that lead from the Tien Shan mountains to the center of Almaty, the building comprises two interlocking L-shaped concrete wings. One is clad in aluminum, symbolizing “the dynamism of the modern city”; the other in limestone, invoking the dominating presence of the mountains in Almaty’s panorama (although the limestone, Smagulov is keen to emphasize, is not quarried locally, but is imported from Bavaria’s Jura formation). A vast chasm named “Art Street,” and apparently inspired by the red sandstone Charyn Canyon on the edge of the Almaty region, close to the border with China, separates the large gallery spaces on the north and south wings of the building.
The building is the work of British mega-practice Chapman Taylor (CT), which specializes in commercial and retail projects such as shopping malls and car salons, and have an extensive portfolio of questionable undertakings in former Soviet countries, including Ukraine (the notorious Ocean Plaza in Kyiv, which envelops Florian Yuriev’s Institute of Scientific and Technical Information), Kazakhstan (numerous malls, car salons, and a sham conservation job on the beloved 1960s neo-expressionist Almaty Hotel), and Russia (Grozny Mall in the Chechen capital, and Dream Island, a commercial neo-Disneyland in Moscow built atop a riverside park). At the ALMA press conference, Smagulov spoke gushingly of Chris Lanksbury, the CT partner leading the project. He said, “Chris has built more than ten of our auto centers, [but] he has never made a museum before.” An international competition was held for the museum, Smagulov said, to which many Kazakhstani and international practices submitted entries. “But we chose Chapman Taylor anyway,” because, Smagulov claimed, “they understand our [Kazakhstani] context like no one else.”
At the opening reception of ALMA, I am introduced to Lanksbury, a quietly-spoken Scot in a sensible suit. Asked about the work he has done in formerly Soviet countries, Lanksbury eagerly seized on the opportunity to include two of his coworkers into the conversation. “In fact,” he says, “my colleagues here are from the Moscow office, um, I mean the former Moscow office.” He elaborated, smirking vaguely, “we’re not allowed to have a Moscow studio,” due to sanctions. So, the employees of Chapman Taylor’s “former” Moscow office set up their own firm in Moscow: CT Architects. Reflecting on the sanctions, Lanksbury says they’re actually not such a bad thing for the firm, because “we’re working together now on the same level, but better.” No Kazakhstani practice worked with Chapman Taylor as architects of record; in effect, the “former” Moscow bureau stepped in, taking advantage of the fact that the bulk of the project documentation was in Russian and mitigating the need to involve local architects. So far, so colonial. Brits and Russians, arm-in-arm, in Kazakhstan, busting sanctions, building museums (but mostly malls and car salons), and making money. Thankfully, as one Almatite told me, the space seems to work well on a functional level, and “as soon as you step into the white cube of the gallery space, you can concentrate on the art and forget about the rest of the building.”
Indeed, “Qonaqtar” is engrossing enough to allow you to forget about the regrettable structure enveloping it. True to its name, “Qonaqtar” welcomes and engages the viewer, and does an impressive job of showcasing and contextualizing ALMA’s collection of works by artists from Kazakhstan, as well as Central and Inner Asia writ large. Among them is an extraordinary series of masks by longtime Almaty-resident Buryat sculptor Serenjab Baldano, which Smagulov bought in the late 1980s and, he claimed, was the first major art purchase he made, thereby inaugurating his collection. There is also a retrospective of pioneering feminist artist Almagul Menlibayeva, overseen by esteemed Thai curator Gridthiya Gaewoong, and a display of some of the global works in ALMA’s collection. Among them is a standard-issue Richard Serra rusty labyrinth, which, Smagulov says proudly, influenced the design of the museum building, and a special room devoted to a monumental canvas by Anselm Kiefer.
An interesting thing happened when we were being shown the Kiefer. The idea for the acquisition came, explained Smagulov and ALMA Artistic Director Meruyert Kaliyeva (who was translating for him from Russian to English, but also creatively elaborating on his comments), during a visit to an exhibition of works by Kiefer on the theme of the history of Venice, specially commissioned for the Palazzo Ducale in April 2022. Kiefer’s canvases portrayed a variety of desolate scenes—a city panorama, a ploughed field, a marsh-filled lagoon—during and in the aftermath of a devastating conflagration. They resonated, she said, both because of their subject matter and monumental scale, and because of their title, These writings, when burned, will finally cast a little light. This sentiment, said Kaliyeva, “spoke to us at a very deep level, because at that time, after January 2022, half of the city [Almaty] was burned down.” Driven by the hope that “the damage will bring something good to society,” Smagulov decided to buy a selection of the works and devote a special space to them in the museum.
The first days of 2022 came to be known as the “January Events” (Qandy Qantar) in Kazakhstan. On January 4, crowds gathered on and around Almaty’s central Republic Square (Respublika Alañy in Kazakh, also known as Novaya Ploshchad, or New Square, in Russian) in solidarity with demonstrators in the city of Zhanaozen, whose protest against sharply rising liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) prices had been put down by security forces over the two days prior. The protests were mostly peaceful, but some of the protesters (possibly provocateurs) resorted to rioting. The Almaty Mayoralty (the Akimat), the presidential palace, and several ministry buildings suffered serious damage—windows were smashed, walls were charred by fire, and possessions looted. Over the course of the following week, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev openly authorized a shoot-to-kill policy. Estimates of the dead exceed 200, with hundreds assaulted, and many thousands injured and abused in the protest’s aftermath. Within days, a “peacekeeping” force, led by Russian troops, was sent to keep order in Kazakhstan, where it stayed for two weeks.2
As a result of these protests and their brutal response, Tokayev, who had taken over from Kazakhstan’s longtime post-Soviet strongman and his own mentor Nursultan Nazarbayev in 2019, embarked on a series of—arguably performative—reforms, seeking to portray his presidency as a sharp break from Nazarbayev’s regime, while at the same time depicting the protests as a conspiracy or provocation orchestrated by forces loyal to Nazarbayev’s “old Kazakhstan.” In subsequent months, Tokayev moved fast to distance himself from networks perceived as Nazarbayev-adjacent, including Tselinny founder Kairat Boranbayev, whose daughter (and Tselinny artistic director) Alima Kairat had been married to Nazarbayev’s son, and who owned property on and around the Square, including the Almaly shopping mall. Boranbayev was imprisoned for several months on corruption charges in 2022, and effectively bailed himself out by surrendering several hundred million dollars’ worth of assets to the state.
Qandy Qantar functions as a ruptural, threshold event for independent Kazakhstan, and for Almaty in particular. Its traumatic load is strengthened by the fact that it took place on Republic Square, which is already marked by association with historical tumult: in 1986, it was the site of the Zheltoqsan (December) uprising, during which hundreds of protesters were massacred by Soviet riot police—and which, Smagulov pointed out during his tour of the Museum, had a formative impact on his consciousness as a Kazakh, and on his worldview in general. Qandy Qantar seemed like an uncanny repeat of Zheltoqsan. Its cumulative trauma was further strengthened by the Russian-led military intervention in Kazakhstan, which immediately followed it and was, in turn, almost immediately followed by the shock of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Whether or not Smagulov and Kaliyeva’s claim that the museum’s blue-chip acquisitions were not bought arbitrarily was sincere or conjured post-factum, an institutional effort was being made to present the entire museum as rooted in locality, and capable of engaging with, rather than seeking flight from, the trauma of Kazakhstan’s past and present. This was further emphasized after the tour of the building, when Smagulov and Kalilyeva sat down in a conference room to answer questions from international journalists. I asked Smagulov how he understands the notion of coloniality, and whether ALMA sees itself as a “decolonial” institution, specifically in relation to Russia. He answered sparingly, but unambiguously. “Yes, we have such a mission.” In the wake of what Smagulov (euphemistically) called “the military actions between Russia and Ukraine,” Kazakhstan “began to think about this [colonialism] a lot, and to reflect on our independence and our identity.” In her elaboration of Smagulov’s words, Kaliyeva was more direct, referring to the sharp uptick in decolonial sentiment in Kazakhstan in the wake of “the war in Ukraine.” She added, “you will see in every artist’s work in the collection traces of such sentiment, because it is an extremely important element now in the new national consciousness.” She added, “if you look at the collection show, you will see that this sentiment started much earlier, from the 1960s onwards, it’s just changing its form.”
Virgin Land, Dry Sea, Buried Spirits
In contrast to ALMA (and to MSN), the Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture is not a museum; it does not have a collection. It is also not a building created from scratch. Like DCCC, its building is created on the basis of an existing structure, one whose meaning is heavily determined by its connection to the imperial and Soviet past.
Tselinny’s building constitutes a contemporary reconstruction—executed by the British architect Asif Khan, working in partnership with his wife, Kazakh architect Zaure Aitayeva, and Almaty-based practice NAAW Studios—of the modernist, glass-fronted Tselinny Cinema. Completed in 1964, Tselinny sits at the western end of Kabanbay Batyr (formerly Kalinin) Street, one of the many tree-lined avenues making up the city’s nineteenth-century grid, itself a legacy of the city’s founding as the fortress town of Verniy (“Loyal”), following the region’s conquest by the Russian Empire in the 1850s.
In Tselinny, the layers of colonial history are piled on thick. The cinema was positioned directly in front of the St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral (completed in 1908), which, in accordance with imperial town-planning conventions, had previously marked the end of the avenue. As widely acknowledged in Almaty, the cinema was placed on this site on purpose: to conceal the church and mark the victory of secular culture over religion; or, put differently, to symbolize the replacement of Russian-majority imperial rule in Kazakhstan, ideologically grounded in faith and monarchy, with Russian majority Soviet-imperial rule, ideologically grounded in Marxism-Leninism, science, and culture.3
Tselinny was opened, and named, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the “Virgin Lands” (Tselina) campaign, launched in 1954: a hyper-extractivist hare-brained agricultural scheme to surpass American grain production by ploughing millions of hectares of fallow land, mostly in northern Kazakhstan. Tselina stemmed from the objectives of Stalin’s Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature, but was implemented with zeal and chutzpah by Nikita Khrushchev in the wake of Stalin’s death in 1953. Its long-term impact was disastrous for the environmental fabric of Kazakhstan: lakes and riverbeds ran dry (among them the Aral Sea, whose disappearance was exacerbated by Tselina), multiple animal species were made extinct, and Kazakhstan’s indigenous demographic balance was further distorted due to the influx of an estimated four million agricultural settlers brought in to implement and embody the campaign.4 Despite these brutal consequences—whose violent, sexualized intentionality is formulated in the name of the campaign itself, and in its chief slogan “osvoenie tseliny” (“the taming of the virgin lands”)—Tselina was widely celebrated in Soviet popular culture and carried connotations of progress and prosperity. The cinema’s facade was marked, until the 1990s, by a stylish modernist neon sign featuring a wheat sheaf, a paradigmatic Soviet marker of plenty.
In the 1990s, following the fall of the USSR, the cinema fell into disrepair and was closed down in 1997. It was soon bought by the entrepreneur Bauyrzhan Ibragimov, who made a series of clumsy interventions into the fabric and program of the building. The 1,200-capacity auditorium was subdivided into two smaller cinemas, the remaining spaces, including the central lobby, were parceled up into smaller chunks, and the balcony in the grand lobby facing the curtain wall was extended and turned into a mezzanine. Apart from the two cinemas, in the early 2000s Tselinny also accommodated a nightclub (initially called Heaven, later Playboy), cafes and restaurants (a branch of the Russian pizza chain Il Patio), a shisha bar, and other miscellanies. The stylized neon came down and was replaced by crude red lettering. Most controversially, the sgraffito gracing the Tselinny lobby—the work of Russian-born Kazakhstani graphic artist Yevgeny Sidorkin—depicting scenes from Kazakh folk culture, myth, and everyday life, was covered by a plaster wall and disfigured by structural interventions made to the building (it was initially thought to have been destroyed).5 When protests were voiced, Ibragimov allowed artists—among them Sidorkin’s wife and son—to reproduce a copy of the sgraffito on the building’s southern facade as a compensatory gesture. But the copy was itself lost in the process of the building’s conversion into the Tselinny CCC.6
In 2016, Tselinny was put on sale again and purchased by tycoon Kairat Boranbayev, whose diverse business portfolio then included oil and gas, retail, hotels, Almaty’s biggest football club (coincidentally called FC Kairat), the Kazakhstani McDonald’s franchise (as well as a large share of the Russian franchise), and, notably, two other Soviet modernist cinemas: Alatau and Baikonur. Alatau, completed in 1960 in a monumental modernist style, was deprived of its status as a historical monument upon purchase in 2014, demolished in 2015, and replaced by a McDonald’s in 2016. Baikonur, completed in 1980 and located in Almaty’s southern suburbs, was disassembled and replaced by a bungalow McDonald’s in 2016.7
In Tselinny’s case, burgerfication was avoided. According to the institution’s director, Jamilya (Jama) Nurkalieva, Kairat had always planned a cultural role for Tselinny, which—by virtue of its location, size, and the beacon-like, open quality of its curtain-walled facade, especially when lit up at night—held a special place in the psychogeographies of successive generations of Almatites. Nurkalieva became acquainted with Kairat in Astana, where she was directing the arts and education program of the World Expo 2017 and the (now-defunct) Astana Contemporary Art Center, located on the site of the Expo. Kairat, Nurkalieva says, had been thinking more along the lines of a theater or performance venue for Tselinny, but, she says, we “were able to make the argument that what Almaty needs is a contemporary culture center” with a multidisciplinary profile. The Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Almaty had closed in 2010, and left something of a void in the local art scene, which could not be filled by any number of commercial galleries.8 And so, the idea for Tselinny was born. In the meantime, Kairat told me, Nurkalieva convinced him, despite his initial reluctance, to take Alima Kairat—his daughter, and a friend and Astana colleague of Nurkalieva—on board as Tselinny’s artistic director.
It was also in Astana that Nurkalieva and Kairat became acquainted with the London-based architect Asif Khan, who had designed the British Pavilion at the Expo; and Asif met the Kazakhstani architect Zaure Aitayeva, who was serving as the chief architect of the Expo, and whom he would come to marry. Speaking at a public discussion on the occasion of the opening of Tselinny, Zaure and Asif recounted how, on a drive into the steppe with Zaure, Asif was struck by the directness of the relationship between the vast expanse of the sky and that of the earth, and the manner in which this relationship was mediated by the elements. “It was sunset, and the rain was coming from the clouds onto the steppe… The rain [connected] the sky and the earth.” In Central Asian cosmology, the rain, Zaure explained to Asif, represented Tengri (the supreme God of the sky), who is “brought down from the sky to the ground” through rainfall. According to Khan, the curvilineal concrete lamellas adorning the facade of Tselinny became “the expression of the cloud… You enter Tselinny through the feeling I had that day, through the cloud.”
Asif’s initial vision for Tselinny facade, however, was less subtle: a sheet of glass lying at a 45-degree angle, reflecting the sun, clouds, and elements for the inspection and immersion of Almatites. Concerns were raised that reflections from the glass ceiling might disturb the inhabitants of neighboring buildings, as well as being too much of a departure from the old cinema facade. In the end, Asif and Zaure came up with the idea of summoning the cloud through curved lamellas, which also loosely resembled the brise-soleils often encountered in Soviet-era modernist architecture in Kazakhstan and elsewhere in the Soviet Union’s sunnier climes. As Finnish architectural historian Markus Lähteenmäki, who curated the exhibition devoted to the design of the new building, suggested during the discussion, Asif’s initial cloud-wall design was quite extravagant and masculine, while the facade as it was ultimately built is the product of the injection of a feminine presence into the design.
Lähteenmäki’s show, “From Sky to Earth,” is based around two central elements: a huge round table with a glass top, a dastarkhan (a communal dining table in Turko-Persian cultures) filled with artifacts and memories, including a maquette of Khan’s original design for Tselinny, printouts of Asif’s phone photos from the construction site, meaningful bits of construction debris, and press clippings; and a series of “dioramic models” depicting successive scenes or stages of the design of the building—creative interpretations of photographs from Asif’s phone rendered by Almaty-based model maker Vassily Mikhailov. In one model, Asif, Zaure, Nurkalieva, and Alima stand demiurgically atop the ceiling of the old cinema, looking down at the Orthodox church beneath them. Both buildings are enveloped in a low-lying cloud, meeting the ground, as the group ponders over which form to adopt for the building under-consideration. In another, a digger stands beside the rescued fragments of Sidorkin’s sgraffito. In another, Khan stands in a pit adjacent to Tselinny holding a rock—a residue from an ancient riverbed, which once ran its course through this part of Almaty. Many of these ancient rocks would later be incorporated into the design of the square outside Tselinny, signaling continuity between the above-ground and subterranean layers. The show possesses a whiff of dry humor, reflecting self-deprecatingly on the demiurgic function of the institution’s architects and founders. But it is also sincere, emphasizing that, as Lähteenmäki writes in the accompanying text, the intention behind Tselinny was never to conjure a new institution from thin air, but to arrive at a “particular architectural sensitivity” that does justice to its site’s (and context’s) “complex and layered past, where natural forces, myth, and distant memories co-exist with multiple layers of rapid growth and colonial construction.”9
As we spoke about their work on Tselinny over several days spent in Astana, Zaure and Asif repeatedly emphasized the extent to which their work was an emotional labor. The emotional, said Asif, is a consistent and integral dimension of his practice as an architect; and it is inherently political, connected to legacies of empire and colonization. Asif learned from Zaure and his trips to Kazakhstan about Central Asian history, the story of Russian and Soviet imperialism, and the transformation and cruelty it brought. These stories resonated strongly with him, he said, due to his own family history; Asif’s father was born in British India, today’s Pakistan, and his mother in British Tanganyika, today’s Tanzania. Asif said that because of this heritage, “I share a lot of the emotional aspects that, in a different way, people here also experience.”
I asked Zaure and Asif how this affective and emotional sensitivity, as well as the connection to nature and spirituality—which they claimed was embodied by the building—related to the name Tselinny, with all its connotations of violence and hyper-extractivism. Was the decision to keep the name made with the intention to lend a new meaning to this trauma-infused concept and the histories it summons? According to Asif, “we all know that the name is very traumatic, and that keeping the name is a very problematic decision. But we did keep, in order to say that, rather than simply canceling history, we have to deal with it.”
The story of Sidorkin’s sgraffito, and the solution that Asif and Zaure conjured for it, is uncannily reminiscent of the fate of Warsaw’s monument to Polish-Soviet Friendship. During Ibragimov’s tutelage over the building, Sidorkin’s sgraffito was not only covered up but badly mutilated. In the early 2000s, thick steel beams supported by concrete pillars were added to the building’s interior to hold up and haphazardly reinforce the mezzanine story. The beams were attached directly onto the surface of the mural. A scene of a young couple picking fruit for their offspring from an Edenic tree was dissected through the mother’s torso and the father’s legs and triceps. The other scenes, depicting turbaned riders galloping through the steppe expanse, a group of figures dancing to the melody of a dombyra lute, and a man courting a woman with flowers and garlanding her hair, are similarly chopped up, with various limbs amputated by the steel girders.
During the process of Tselinny’s reconstruction, the surviving sections of the mural were removed from the wall for conservation by artisans working in consultation with Khan and the Tselinny team—among them the historian Almaz Ordabayev, a contemporary of Sidorkin’s. The original fragments have been reinstalled and left in Sidorkin’s palette (or rather, in the white-black color-inverted scheme left over from a 1990s repainting; the sgraffito was originally white-on-ochre in the 1964 original), while the destroyed sections are recreated in “ghosted white,” so that the “scars are visible,” in Khan’s words. The partial restoration speaks also to the fact that, as Lähteenmäki acknowledges in his text, the mural is itself the product of a colonial framing that “uses Kazakh symbols as tropes to tell a story of progress and modernization” that is imported (or imposed) from outside. It is also imbued with racialized and sexualized hierarchies of dependence: in the romantic couples in Sidorkin’s mural, the men are white and Slavic; the women are Asian, presumably Kazakh.10
While the scars are visible on the mural itself, the trail of its destruction and re-creation is scattered all over Tselinny’s facade and interior. Stylized holes are carved into the white concrete of the building’s south and north walls, which Khan describes as “petroglyphs.” Their shapes speak to abstracted details from Sidorkin’s sgrafitto while also referring to the intricate Bronze Age rock carvings in the Tanbaly Gorge, a steppe oasis 120 kilometers away from Almaty. Khan’s petroglyphs also feature throughout the interior of the building as motifs carved into the building’s slick, stainless steel-clad stairwells, and in the wayfinding system; cupped hands from the sgraffito signal the location of the hand-dryers in the toilet.
Unlike the opening programs of larger institutions like ALMA or MSN, which featured a maelstrom of receptions, performances, exhibitions, concerts, and panel discussions held over several days, Tselinny’s opening was concentrated around one event, a nearly two-hour-long concert-performance titled Barsakelmes, a sensational Gesamtkunstwerk on the theme of the desiccation of the Aral Sea. Named after a former island in the middle of the water, now a barren hillock in a forbidding landscape of salt and sand, Barsakelmes is a towering achievement. The words, concocted by poet and writer Anuar Duisenbinov (who also edits Tselinny’s book-publishing operation) are rendered in a mix of Kazakh and Russian, with one language merging into the other through the mediation of regional dialects, neologisms, and the addition of words in Uzbek, Uyghur, and Kyrgyz—as well as a long shamanic glossolalic tongue delivered by the Turkish-Uyghur-Kazakh performance artist Saadet Türköz. This heteroglossia, reinforced by the Aral Sea’s nodal location on the borders of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and the supranational consequences of its catastrophic disappearance, bring the politics and ecology of Almaty and Kakazkhstan not only into a pan–Central Asian chorus, but a planetary one.
The music of Barsakelmes melds pop, rock, and elements of traditional melody played on instruments like the kobyz (a bowed string instrument featured also on the Sidorkin sgrafitto), as well as melancholy moments of hip-hop and R&B delivered by performers including Duisenbinov, Türköz, singer and composer Samrat Irzhassov (Samrattama—credited by my Almaty interlocutors as the idea-giver of the performance), the band Steppe Sons, Nūrbek Elemes (dudeontheguitar), Lovozero, and Zere. The outstanding costumes, makeup, and hairdressing—the work of a collective team led by the local Törteu design studio—invoke myth, catastrophe, resistance, renewal, as well as acts of masking and mimicry. The performers don and shed masks of various shapes throughout the show. Duisenbinov’s upper garment is particularly arresting: a black oilcloth vest resembling fish scales, padded out on all sides with ghostly masks, like an ancestor-mediating puffer gilet.
Each element in the performance played a part in the narrative, but the roles, according to sociologist and theorist Diana Kudaibergen, who worked on the piece together with Duisenbinov, fluctuated throughout the work’s development. Duisenbinov’s character is a zhyrau, a poetic scribe who narrates the tale of Nurtole, a mythical Central Asia figure, who “with the sound of his kobyz, banished a kingdom of marauding snake creatures”—who had once terrorized the inhabitants of the Kazakh steppe—into the depths of the Aral Sea.11 In the wake of the drying out of the sea, however, these snake creatures threaten to be set loose again and unleash new havoc unto the world. The “pretext” for the performance, writes Kudaibergen, is thus an updating of the legend of Nurtole for our new, dried-out reality, as well as a “contemporary critique” of the “crises” and “evil spirits” in our midst today.
In Barsakelmes, Nurtole emerges from the journey (which takes place through the mediation of a monumental flame-colored felt Bosaga, or ancestral portal, conjured by Kazakh artist Gulnur Mukazhanova) unencumbered by ancestral spirits and strengthened by his encounter with the “new fish” that, despite the devastation, “thrive in the salty waters of what remains from the small Aral now.” As Kudaibergen points out, even though the name Barsakelmes means, in literal translation, “if one goes there, one won’t return,” “the journey is worth taking,” because one surfaces from it—like Nurtole—a “new person.”
In Kudaibergen’s reading, the message of the narrative is clear. Barsakelmes is not the re-telling of an apocalyptic nightmare, a fatalistic crying over disappeared water. “It is a hopeful singing”; both a “ritualistic expose” of the type of future that threatens to become a reality, and a mapping of the “way to salvation,” which comes “in a collective effort to lay the bad spirits at the bottom of the Sea once again.” So, who, in Barsakelmes’s contemporary re-imagining of the myth, are these bad spirits, these evil snakes?
It is not for me to determine who the evil snakes are from the perspective of the Barsakelmes narrative itself (or from that of the Tselinny team), but I can say who they seemed to be to me, as I digested and interpreted the performance. I attended Barsakelmes on the day of the VIP opening of Tselinny, to which international and Kazakhstani guests, journalists, and patrons of the institution were invited. As we took our seats in Tselinny’s vast hall, the lights were switched off in anticipation of the beginning of the performance. A spotlight flickered on. Unexpectedly, it did not animate any of the performers, but instead the figure of the founder, the charismatic Kairat, dressed in a crisp white shirt and black suit. Among the very first things Kairat said in his short speech, in front of the hundreds of guests assembled, was a message of thanks to Anton Belov, the former director of Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, who was in the audience, and whom Kairat described both as a “great friend,” and as an important friend and mentor to Tselinny. Before addressing Belov, however, Kairat apologized in advance to the Tselinny team, who, he conceded, would hold his words against him.
Indeed, in conversations over the preceding days, employees of Tselinny were at pains to emphasize their non-association with Garage. Yes, Garage had given support and advice to Tselinny in its early days. Yes, the model of establishing a private, oligarch-financed arts institution in a renovated Soviet-era building was not uninfluenced by Garage, which was housed in a Soviet-era restaurant in Moscow, reimagined palimpsestically according to a design by Rem Koolhaas. Yes, Garage had coordinated one of Tselinny’s major early projects, the publication of a guide to Almaty’s postwar Soviet modernist architecture, co-edited not by local experts but by Russian architectural historians Anna Bronovitskaya and Nikolay Malinin. But no, Tselinny is not some kind of Almaty “version” of Garage, as it is sometimes described, both in Kazakhstan and overseas. Tselinny is pursuing its own path, and Kairat’s acknowledgment that the Tselinny team may not appreciate his words about Belov’s friendship lent public recognition to their disavowal of Garage’s mentorship over their institution. It is crucial to recognize, too, that neither Belov nor anyone affiliated to any Russian institutions retains a presence on Tselinny’s advisory board.
As I was leaving my hotel in Almaty on the way to the airport, a group of drunk white people got into the lift with me—visitors from the country neighboring Kazakhstan to the north. One of them was wearing a tracksuit with a Russian flag on it and the word “Rossiya” emblazoned all over, on the chest, back, arms, and legs. They were screaming and guffawing at each other, complaining about what they considered to be the poor hospitality culture in Kazakhstan (so much for stereotype). The presence, din, and stench of snake creatures is vividly felt all over the Russian neo-empire’s vast just-beyond.12
Inga Lāce, “Qonaqtar: Pathways from the Collection of the Almaty Museum of Arts,” in Qonaqtar (Almaty Museum of Arts, 2025), 16.
For a summary of the events, see Diana Kudaibergen, What Does it Mean to be Kazakhstani: Power, Identity and Nation-Building (London: Hurst, 2025), 143–61.
For the architectural and town-planning context of Tselinny see, Anna Bronovitskaya et al., Alma-Ata: Arkhitektura Sovetskogo Modernizma 1955–1991 (Tselinny Center for Contemporary Culture ; Garage Museum, 2018), 44-45.
Zhanna Mazhitova et al., “Environmental Consequences of Khrushchev’s Virgin Land Campaign in Kazakhstan (1950s–1960s),” E3S Web of Conferences 258 (2021).
See Alex Fisher, “Seeing through the sgraffito: Tselinny’s adaptive reuse,” East East, 2024, ➝.
See “From Caligula to Selling Sofas: How Tselinny Survived the 1990s and 2000s,” Vlast, December 13, 2024, ➝.
Neither restaurant—nor Kairat’s other McDonald’s restaurants in Kazakhstan and Russia, where he also owned a chunk of the franchise—have had a smooth ride. McDonald’s withdrew from Russia following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Kazakhstan’s McDonald’s restaurants received their meat from a distribution centre in the Russian city of Ekaterinburg, which could therefore no longer handle patties under the American brand. In consequence, Kairat’s Almaty McDonald’s restaurants have had to rebrand, and currently operate under the name “I’m.” See Maria Gorbokonenko, “Istoria o tom, ka na meste dvuh kinoteatrov v Almaty poyavilsya MacDonald’s,” Orda, January 7, 2023, ➝.
“Documentation: Imagination of Central Asia on the Map of Contemporary Art,” an archival exhibition devoted to the artworlds of Central Asia in the 1990s, curated by Bishkek-based Asel Rashidova, is on display in Tselinny until April 14, 2026.
Markus Lähteenmäki, From Sky to Earth: Tselinny by Asif Khan and How it is Made (Almaty: Tselinny CCC, 2025), 1.
Lähteenmäki, From Sky to Earth, 2.
Diana Kudaibergen, Barsakelmes, ed. Anuar Duisenbinov (Tselinny CCC, 2025). Text also available online: ➝.
As this text goes to press, signs are afoot that Kazakhstan’s government, which so far has nimbly asserted (relative) autonomy, is becoming vulnerable (or receptive) to Russian pressure to toe the line. Several Russian exiles critical of the regime—and one Ukrainian, forced to accept Russian citizenship in 2014 following the occupation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula—have been deported to Russia in recent months, or are currently facing extradition proceedings. See, “Russians Fleeing Repressions and Mobilization Once Found Refuge in Kazakhstan. Now, Kazakh Authorities Are Helping Moscow Hunt Them Down,” Meduza, February 19, 2026, ➝.