‘YOU ARE HERE’: Perspectives on Central Asia, via an exhibition in Europe

The exhibition YOU ARE HERE. Central Asia, on view at Fondazione Elpis in Milan from October 24, 2024-April 13, 2025, presents an orientation to the region from the perspective of 27 artists, linked by their connection to the expansive and diverse geography known as Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan), though varied in every other way–by generation, technique, medium and practice.

Guest curators Dilda Ramazan and Aida Sulova, active participants in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, respectively, despite now living in Europe and the US, invited artists to identify their own positionality—temporally, spatially, psychologically, politically, existentially—relative to the broad question: Where are you? The gesture of agency contrasts the way the region tends to be spoken for, typically through persistent and tired stereotypes around conflict and terrorism, government corruption and cultural mystery.

Ambivalent about its geographic point of departure, the show acknowledges there is something shared about Central Asia, yet that identity in and of itself is not exhaustive enough to encompass what it means to be from there. What is comprehensive and far more compelling is the perspective of artists self-positioning through the lens of art on a more three-dimensional map. The exhibition spans painting, video, sculpture, photography and performance, also including an impressive collection of contemporary approaches to traditional textile-making, from weaving, sewing, stitching, quilting, felting and other practices endemic to the region.

A striking collage by Anna Ivanova combines circular “tree stump” cross-sections built from fabric scraps embroidered and painted onto a colourful ikat ground, bordered by a wide band of resist-dyed skyscrapers and construction cranes. Riffing on a traditional hand-embroidered technique known as Suzani, the work references environmental damage brought about by the rapid development transforming the artist’s native Uzbekistan. Similarly, Munara Abdukakharova updates the ubiquitous Kyrgyz toshok, or floor mattress utilised functionally in the exhibition as seating, with Soviet symbols and recognisable city markers, slowly defamiliarising as the capital of Bishkek itself evolves.

The culturally-themed group exhibition harkens back a decade or two, when the global majority of art worlds were incrementally discovered; this time not by European explorers, but by ambitious art market forces.This slate of group shows purportedly introduced to European and US audiences artists from South Asia, the Gulf states, Africa, China and South America—areas previously deemed too remote with artworks that were too challenging to access. In their efforts to interpret new practices within a context historically dominated by Euro-America, these projects were often painted in broad, totalising strokes and tended to flatten complexity and extinguish details. YOU ARE HERE thus comes at an interesting time, when after a few enthusiastic waves, such exhibitions fizzled out mostly by the 2010s, seemingly having run their course. Everything was discovered! Yet for some reason, Central Asia remains perpetually unknown, inherently disorienting. It’s a place of deep hybridity, collapsing neat separation between East and West, as the Russian Empire operated distinctly from European imperialists like France and Britain by taking place overland, focusing on neighbouring geographies whose histories and cultural practices were more easily erased and assimilated. And, the relatively recent independence movements in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union means that national and cultural identities are evolving and emerging in real time.

The Venice Biennale inaugurated the first pavilion dedicated to representing Central Asia in 2005, with individual national pavilions for Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and the Kyrgyz Republic in recent years presenting high visibility exhibitions. The explosion of culturally-themed group shows in the post-9/11, globalising art world included more than a few projects featuring Central Asian artists in Europe, including at the ACC Weimar (2002), Istanbul Biennial (2005) and a notable project in Italy, The Tamerlane Syndrome: Art and Conflicts in Central Asia, also in 2005. In 2022, Documenta15 prominently featured several collectives operating from across the region. Despite waves of international attention, within the region, infrastructure for art and culture, not unlike many other regions, has been slow to develop. Recently, however, this has been picking up with culture ministries recognising the strategic possibilities of art and throwing support into new projects, particularly in Uzbekistan, including supporting a splashy new biennial to open this fall in Bukhara.

Yet, the art world keeps discovering the region. Does our preoccupation with identifying simple narratives for places less familiar to dominant cultures obscure our capacity to understand those areas on their own terms, within a prism of their paradoxes? Is Central Asia culturally barren or resource-rich? Is it perennially unstable or grappling with the challenges of sustaining democracy like just about everywhere else – recently independent or not? Does the art world’s obsession with finding unturned stones (and markets) precipitate a tendency to forget what we already know?

Central Asia’s geopolitical invisibility, within the globalised art ecology in particular, belies the richness of its potential as a site of learning and expansion of thought. Not in a romanticised, metaphorical way – in a literal sense. By looking closer at the developments following the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the ways national and cultural identity are reshaping, we might find ways to reorient ourselves within the constraints and contradictions of our own regions.

Some of the strongest works in the exhibition are part of a rotating film programme, the standout of which is Saodat Ismailova’s 2020 video essay Her Five Lives, which has been on a world tour for the last few years. A compilation of archival film clips and social media snapshots, the video depicts the transformation of Uzbek film heroines over five periods of national and political history. This, however, isn’t a linear progression from colonisation to liberation, but a portrait of the embodied, messy path toward self-determination.  

Yerbossyn Meldibekov’s metal sculptures trouble the maps we rely on for scientific information. Four wall-hung aluminium basins engraved with topographical markings seem to chart various regional mountain peaks, though these 3D maps are misshapen, with surfaces transformed into their own jagged terrain, rendering straightforward reading a challenge. Decades of Soviet rule rendered native languages and customs invisible, including replacing the names of mountain peaks. Meldibekov’s work reveals the hubris of renaming natural phenomena which will inevitably outlive the reign of any one government.

Several artists articulate their evolving relationship with a changing and often disintegrating natural landscape. A series of photographs document Ulan Djaparov’s performance as he communes his physical form with a Bishkek river, his body splayed across the rocks like a tree branch, or a piece of discarded trash—a commentary on the persistent issue of pollution in Kyrgyzstan. Zhanel Shakhan’s exploration of the self also begins with her body—naked—shot on an iPhone, a bit fuzzy and at a distance, both at home and out of place in her natural environment.

To be sure, there is something exciting happening across Central Asia, though a big question is are we willing to slow the momentum to absorb Central Asia into existing systems and instead look to it for new forms, modes and value systems? Paying attention to the region on its own terms may build muscle and intercept an impulse to recreate what we already have. Many artists, curators, scholars and activists based in the region and part of the growing diaspora seem to be together in growing dialogues across an expanded ecosystem. A byproduct of lacking formalised arts infrastructure is that many arts organisations like Steppe Space and Kuduk, which are grassroots, artist-led platforms, are galvanising social and ecological change via virtual and IRL (in real life) spaces and show transformative potential beyond the region.

In an exterior courtyard, Rashid Nurekeyev’s Landmark by the Sun, a wooden structure topped with a fox head, resembles a totem more than the land surveying tool that its form references. Rather than marking key points on the Earth’s surface for civic or federal activity, this sculpture becomes part of the natural landscape establishing dialogue between the exhibition site in Italy and other regions in his native Kazakhstan, where Nurekeyev has installed previous landmarks. There is the possibility of a network here of reciprocal learning and mutual transformation.

In highlighting some of these layers, YOU ARE HERE provides a unique, if not belated, opportunity to reorient an understanding toward this polyvalent region. Deeper exploration by art audiences will inevitably lead to more nuanced and sustained understanding, as we take the lead of artists who locate themselves in relation to the part of the world they come from. Before absorbing the region into the dominant modes of the Euro-American art worlds, perhaps we take the current opportunity to put the onus not on the exhibition or the artists, but on ourselves as informed viewers to see differently.

‘YOU ARE HERE: Central Asia’ is on view at Fondazione Elpis, Milan, until April 13, 2025.

(The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its editors.)