The Philadelphia Museum of Art will present a survey of video and film by contemporary artists from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, the first of its kind in the United States. Live Cinema/Return of the Image: Video from Central Asia (on view November 16, 2007 through February 17, 2008 in Gallery 179) looks at recent developments in the artistic production of a region that has been largely underrepresented in the international art world.
In the Search of Place, The Dervish Way and Eccentricity and Melancholia, investigate the unique history of this turbulent region and its effect upon artistic production. Viktor Misiano, guest curator and founder and editor-in-chief of Moscow Art Magazine, credits Central Asian artists with retaining trust in what he describes as “the figuratively authentic and immediately suggestive ‘image.’”
Video became the leading medium for Central Asian artist in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union and allowed for the continuation of a visual tradition in which figurative imagery complements the existing oral tradition. Therefore, the Return of the Image is not meant to imply that these artists are returning to the image, as they have never really left it. As Misiano explains in the brochure that accompanies the exhibition, “these artists, who have only recently become a part of the international art scene, are returning the image to us, an audience that often has far too many doubts as to its potential.”
Thematically the films highlight a range of artistic concerns, from questions of religion, war, and national identity to an examination of intimacy, alienation, and the elusive nature of human interaction. The films include works by Ernst Abdarazakov, Vyacheslay Akhunov, Said Atabekov, Maxim Boronilov, Ulan Djaparov, Natasha Dyu, Rustam Khalfin, Roman Maskalev, Almagul Menliayeva, Sergey Tichina, Yuliya Tikhonova, Chingiz Tokochev, and Alexander Ugay.
The first of the three programs, In Search of the Place, presents a series of videos that refer to folklore, nomadism, ancient monuments and rituals – all important aspects of Central Asian national identity which had been challenged by new authoritarian governments. The visual structure and medium of these works reflect a continuous state of becoming, in which landscapes flash by from a freight truck’s window in Maskalev and Boronilov’s Paris, veils fly from the artist’s face in Menlibayeva’s Jihad and a camera jiggles, unable to focus on one point in both parts of Khalfin and Tikhonova’s Northern Barbarians.
The Dervish Way, the second program in the series, features artists exploring their own identities and place within their culture. Like modern Dervishes, Atabekov in Walkman, Akhunov and Tichina in Corner and Askent and Djaparov in E la nave va… present themselves as wanderers, musicians, dancers, shamans, or sages in an open-ended way that reveals their interest in primary sources of civilization as well as their attempts to restore an understanding of creativity as a harmonious act in which, action, image, words, and material creation are brought together.
The videos in Eccentricity and Melancholia are representative of a younger generation of artists who respond to daily life by rejecting the heroic stance that earlier generations of artists had taken on. Djaparov’s Pancake Monsters cultivates simple actions bereft of any goals, while Dyu’s Melancholy constructs an imaginary world that would not have been possible a decade earlier. In Ugay and Maskalev’s Mourning, the stories constructed around senseless death and needless heroism generate a work that is not only ironic, but full of deep nostalgia. -- www.philamuseum.org
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