Abstract

This panel brings together curatorial and artistic research perspectives to examine how water is conceptualised, represented, and contested in modern and contemporary imaginary from Kazakhstan. Spanning film, painting, conceptual practices, and interdisciplinary inquiry, the presentations approach water not only as a visual motif but as a critical lens through which to explore the nexus of hydro cosmology, ecology, and history in the region.

The panel traces shifting artistic engagements with water—from local cultural knowledge to Soviet-era depictions of rivers, lakes, and industrial modernisation and recent practices that foreground environmental crisis and memory. Water emerges as a site where competing narratives intersect: as resource and commodity, as carrier of cultural and cosmological meaning, and as a medium through which artists address the legacies of colonial infrastructure, extraction, and ecological degradation.

Particular attention is given to key sites such as the Aral Sea, Caspian Sea, and Lake Balkhash, whose transformations illuminate broader hydrosocial dynamics. Central to the panel is the concept of hydro-cosmology, which frames water as a relational and epistemic system that connects human, ecological, and spiritual dimensions. Through this lens, water is understood not only as material or resource, but as a carrier of cultural knowledge shaped by nomadic epistemologies, oral traditions, and embodied practices. In dialogue with this, the notion of infrastructures of care highlights how artistic and research-based practices engage with water through forms of responsibility, repair, and collaboration across communities and scales.

Bringing together works from museum collections, long-term artistic initiatives, and interdisciplinary collaborations, the panel proposes water as a central framework for understanding how artists in Kazakhstan negotiate questions of identity, responsibility, and planetary interdependence in a time of ecological uncertainty.