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- Convenor:
-
Mollie Arbuthnot
(University of Cambridge)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
Mollie Arbuthnot
(University of Cambridge)
- Discussant:
-
Snezhana Atanova
(Nazarbayev University Constructor University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Theme:
- Cultural Studies, Art History & Fine Art
- Location:
- 306 (Floor 3)
- Sessions:
- Saturday 8 June, -
Time zone: Asia/Almaty
Abstract:
This panel examines the practices and discourses of artistic production in Soviet Uzbekistan, covering visual art, architecture, and photography. The turbulent political landscape from the 1920s to the 1940s both enabled experimentation in artistic production and introduced unprecedentedly high political stakes to questions of representation, “national” cultural heritage, and identity. Soviet institutions were often (but not exclusively) dominated by Russo-European experts, meaning that, paradoxically, the search for usable pasts and attempts to define “national forms” were often led by non-Uzbek actors. But processes of Sovietisation were not straightforward and solely top-down but were debated and ongoing for several decades, and in some cases strongly relied on the knowledge and participation of local experts, who contributed to both discourses and practices in ways that sometimes radically differed from their non-local counterparts.
The contested processes of producing new visual and material codes for Soviet Uzbekistan bridged institutions and spheres that are often considered to be separate—as seen in Pronina’s work on the intersection of architecture and heritage preservation—and were constructed and deconstructed in the public sphere, as Dennett’s work on photographic propaganda and censorship reveals. While all these efforts to create new identities and materialities aimed at the building of socialism—a future-oriented project occurring in the present—they simultaneously strongly engaged with histories of the region, creating overlaps between the work of architects, photographers, propagandists, ethnographers, journalists, Orientalists, painters, museologists, and bureaucrats. A common thread connecting all four papers is therefore the multiple ways that the politics of artistic production in this period attempted to grapple with the legacies of the past.
Lastly, as Klimenko’s work details, many prominent figures connected to artistic spheres in the first half of the twentieth century published autobiographies in the later decades of the Soviet Union. These autobiographies present distinct narratives through a multiplicity of individual lives across shifting official publication practices and add another layer to our discussion of historicising practices, showing how the past was once again utilized within the frame of memoir-writing. Through considering varying figures, institutions, and fields involved in artistic and political activities in Uzbekistan in the early Soviet period, this panel sheds light on the intricacies and entanglements of these processes and their surrounding discourses, complicating straightforward historical narratives of the period.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Saturday 8 June, 2024, -Abstract:
In this paper, I consider the relationship between art, publication practices, memory, and the production of a public persona in and in relation to Soviet Uzbekistan. Specifically, I examine memoirs written by (mostly Russian) artists or prominent figures in artists’ circles in Uzbekistan in the 1920s and 1930s. Most of their memoirs, however, were published from the late 1960s until the early 1990s, and recounted events that had happened decades earlier. In some ways, from the 1960s onward, there was more space within officially published Soviet texts to discuss art and artists who had been repressed in the 1930s. However, these memoirs still skewed or evaded critical narratives, and only some artists from the period were given such a platform. Looking at these sources, this paper asks: What does an analysis of the narratives of these memoirs reveal about autobiographical practices in and about Uzbekistan in the late Soviet and post-Soviet period? How do these narratives change over time? How does such a reading complicate existing histories of art in Uzbekistan the 1920s and 1930s? And what particularities are present in the case of Uzbekistan that push against scholarship on autobiographical writing in the Soviet Union? Through answering these questions, this paper contributes to studies on Soviet autobiographical practices, which have mainly looked at autobiographical works published in the interwar period and written within the Russian SFSR. Rather, this paper shifts the focus to autobiographical practices of the late Soviet period and within or about Uzbekistan. Similarly, while these memoirs have been used as sources in the works of historians writing on art in Uzbekistan in the interwar period, the focus has largely fallen on their presented timelines and events, rather than on narrative forms, publishing practices, or the production of subjectivities across a temporal divide.
Abstract:
My research focuses on the development of the field of architecture, including projects and discourses, in Soviet Uzbekistan from the 1930s to the early 1950s. The establishment of new educational and creative architectural institutions in the republic after 1924 led to the reshaping of the professional field and the influx of the specialists from other parts of the Union. At the same time, the ustos (‘masters’ in Uzbek) who belonged to the local architectural traditions still remained and had to change their professional paths. On the other hand, the stylistic debates about the new architecture emerging throughout the country were exceptionally lively. Although it has been previously largely assumed that the transition to so-called socialist realist architecture (a term barely used in the professional circle, as I revealed) was clear-cut and designed top-down, I complicate the picture by showing a diverse range of various opinions on what Soviet Uzbek architecture should look like from those who were involved in the discussion: architects, ustos, restorers, Orientalists, and bureaucrats. I argue that (1) the question of how to define the ‘national’ in architecture as well as the ways and limits of applying such a quality in projects, was always central in professional discussions. Additionally, I show that (2) it was the ustos’ expertise that was desperately needed to create truly ‘national in form and socialist in content’ buildings and to develop the Soviet architectural school, so their skills were used in many different ways, from decorative works to restoration projects and teaching. Moreover, I state that (3) the search for the contemporary architectural language was mostly very much historically centered; the choice of different historical references for the projects as well as their critique was based on the interpretations of the ‘Uzbek national heritage’.
The paper is based on archival materials from the State Archive of the Republic of Uzbekistan, all the protocols of the creative discussions and reports of the Union of Soviet Architects of Uzbekistan for the period indicated. Additionally, I rely on a wide range of the published sources by the architects and critics as well as their memoirs.
Abstract:
This paper examines the discourse surrounding photography and portraiture in Soviet propaganda of the 1930s. More than any other visual medium, photography both recorded and constructed the transformations of the tumultuous early Soviet period; as a result, the field of photographic production was meticulously calibrated and overseen by Soviet institutions. Across magazines, newspapers, exhibitions, and photobooks, photographs that circulated in the public sphere were repeatedly celebrated for their ability to operate on two registers simultaneously: presenting the specificity of individual historical actors while also demonstrating more generally the symbolic blossoming made possible by socialist revolution. Indeed, the striking coexistence of fact and symbol became key to formulating photography’s unique contributions to the aesthetic program of Socialist Realism. Yet despite embracing the photographic medium’s specificity and modernity, an anxiety of influence permeates debates in this period, as photographers and painters alike remained deeply preoccupied by each other’s work. They persistently turned to historicism as they publicly disavowed “leftist” formalism and attempted to articulate their aesthetic goals. I compare the editorial framing of photographic portraits published in the 1930s in Sovetskoe Foto, SSSR Na Stroike, Pravda Vostoka, and 10 let Uzbekistana with discussions of portraiture from the Union of Artists of Uzbekistan and plans for exhibitions preserved in the Central State Archive in Tashkent. This visual and textual corpus reveals how interrelated different media were in their search for political forms during this period. At the same time, photography’s documentary specificity also made it the primary target for censorship in the aftermath of the Stalinist purges, as symbolic gestures and historical contingency converged on individual faces in a reconfigured struggle over representation.