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- Format:
- Panel
- Theme:
- Cultural Studies, Art History & Fine Art
Abstract
Temporary panel for all accepted proposals in CULT
Accepted papers
Abstract
This paper proposes Nomadic Exchange as a methodological framework for rethinking Central Eurasia beyond nation-state logics, institutional mobility, and extractive models of cultural exchange. Drawing from ongoing Indigenous-led, artist-run collaborations between Central Asia and Native North America, the paper argues that nomadic exchange is not merely a theme or metaphor, but a living cultural infrastructure rooted in kinship, land-based knowledge, and long-term relational accountability.
Dominant approaches to Central Eurasia often frame the region through geopolitical borders, imperial histories, or post-Soviet transition narratives. While analytically useful, these frameworks frequently overlook Indigenous epistemologies that understand space as relational, mobile, and continually negotiated. This paper centers Indigenous artist-led exchange as a counter-method—one that privileges lived experience, shared labor, and mutual obligation over institutional outcomes or state-centered cultural diplomacy.
The paper draws on the author’s sustained involvement with Nomadic Exchange, an Indigenous-led initiative founded by Kyrgyz artist Shaarbek Amankul in Kyrgyzstan that fosters long-term collaboration among artists, scholars, and culture bearers from Central Asia and Indigenous communities in North America. Since 2024, the project has intentionally shifted away from international “residency” models toward a kinship-based approach grounded in shared travel, communal making, collective authorship, and ongoing return. These exchanges operate without fixed curricula or hierarchical authority, emphasizing reciprocity, trust, and care as foundational structures.
Positioning Nomadic Exchange as a method, the paper explores three interrelated dimensions:
Infrastructure – how artist-run initiatives function as alternative systems of knowledge production and circulation beyond state and academic institutions; Mobility – how Indigenous-led exchange reframes movement not as access or privilege, but as responsibility to land, community, and relationship; and Power – how lateral Indigenous solidarities unsettle dominant narratives of representation, expertise, and cultural value.
By foregrounding artists as theorists and cultural workers as method-makers, this paper challenges conventional separations between scholarship and practice. It asks how Central Eurasia might be reimagined through Indigenous relational frameworks that predate and exceed modern borders, while remaining deeply entangled with contemporary political, economic, and ecological realities.
Ultimately, the paper contributes to Central Eurasian studies by offering an Indigenous, practice-based methodology for understanding space, society, and power as dynamic processes sustained through relationships rather than governance. Nomadic Exchange is presented not as a case study to be analyzed from a distance, but as an active method through which alternative futures are continually rehearsed and enacted.
Abstract
In this essay, oq oltin—Uzbek for “white gold”—is examined in two interrelated contexts: as a symbol of Soviet ideological propaganda (collectivization and exploitative labor practices) and as an emblem of Soviet “national” modernity. It traces the term’s uncritical reappropriation in the 1990s and its more recent critical, postcolonial reassessment in contemporary Uzbekistan.
Drawing on art, photography, political posters, agitation porcelain, poetry and prose, as well as rituals and participatory practices such as the cotton kurultai (national congress) and pakhta bairami (harvest festival) from the 1930s onward, the essay follows the transformation of cotton from a decorative textile motif into a highly recognizable visual and performative symbol of ideological power. Across these media, the cotton boll functioned simultaneously as an aesthetic marker of “national” form and Soviet socialist modernity.
Ultimately, the essay demonstrates how cotton—an agricultural monocrop that hindered diversified industrial development, contributed to environmental degradation, curtailed rural educational opportunities, damaged public health, and entrenched economic dependency on Moscow through coercive labor regimes—nonetheless became associated with socialist modernity, the Soviet way of life, and (post)Soviet “national” pride.
Abstract
This ethnographic account explores the economic adaptation of Afghan migrants in Kyrgyzstan, concentrating on how individuals navigate instability, mobilize social networks, and negotiate barriers. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews, the study critically engages migration literature to frame economic adaptation as a multidimensional process shaped by legal status, cultural context, and social capital.
Findings reveal that Afghan migrants first rely on kinship and ethnic networks for basic survival, gradually modifying and accumulating capital to achieve economic mobility. Despite restrictive legal regimes, many negotiate their status informally—collaborating with locals, utilizing proxy documentation, or maintaining strategic ties with officials. Language acquisition, cultural adjustment, and resilience in precarious labor markets further illustrate the complex interplay between structure and agency.
This account contributes to Central Asian migration studies by offering a grounded account of how displaced Afghans carve out economic livelihoods under constraint, challenging linear or state-centered models of integration.
Abstract
The paper sheds light on Indie and Underground music scenes in Astana and Almaty based on the data collected through 56 in-depth interviews with musicians and music experts and 16 observations conducted from August 2024 until August 2025. Building on concepts of music fans as mediators (Arriagada and Cruz, 2014) and executive fans (Edlom and Karlsson, 2021), the work views local alternative musicians as musicians/music fans. It outlines the fusion of roles as an important characteristic of the music scene and acknowledges the role of fandom in developing the scene. The research outlines participatory and convergence culture (Jenkins, 2013) as facilitators that allowed musicians/music fans to create communities, independent organizations and micro labels. I demonstrate how local musicians are driven by the love for music and take on organizational responsibilities like opening venues, organizing concerts, music residencies, generating knowledge, and popularizing the scene among the audience. The work also outlines collaboration and relational labor (Baym, 2018) as strategies musicians use to enter the music scene and gain financial stability. It discusses the gender issues and power dynamics in the scene that create some challenges for female artists.
Abstract
One of the most comprehensive and historically significant collections of Central Asian photographs is the Turkestan Album, compiled in 1871–72 by order of General Konstantin P. von Kaufman, the first Governor-General of Russian Turkestan. This monumental album – essentially a multi-volume survey of the region – contains approximately 1,200 to 1,400 photographs, alongside architectural plans, watercolor drawings, and maps. It was produced shortly after the Russian conquest of Central Asia, with the goal of acquainting officials and scholars in the Russian Empire and Europe with the newly colonized territories. The complete album was published in four parts (bound in six large volumes) covering: Archaeology (Islamic architectural monuments, chiefly of Samarkand), Ethnography (portraits and daily life of various ethnic groups in Turkestan), Trades/Industries (scenes of crafts, markets, and occupations), and History (Russian military personnel and battle sites from the conquest period).
Likewise, the Archaeological part contains invaluable early photographs of Islamic architectural landmarks (mosques, madrasas, mausoleums) soon after Russian occupation – a record critical for art history, given that some structures were later altered or restored. The Historical part is distinctive in its colonial perspective: it features portraits of Russian military officers and panoramic shots of forts and battlefields, effectively celebrating the Russian conquest.
Preservation and access to the Turkestan Album have been an ongoing concern. Only a few complete sets survive today, held by institutions such as the Library of Congress (USA), the Russian State Library, and the National Library of Uzbekistan. The Library of Congress acquired its set in 1934 from a New York bookseller (Israel Perlstein), and due to the album’s fragility, researchers now consult it mostly through digital or microfilm copies. The album’s scholarly importance has been recognized in recent studies. For example, Nadzhafov (2017) highlighted the Turkestan Album’s value as a historical source on Central Asian ethnography and the Russian Empire’s orientalist endeavors. Moreover, modern historians note that the album was part of Governor Kaufman’s propaganda effort to cast Russia’s rule in a positive light[10]. Despite its propagandistic origins, the Turkestan Album today remains an indispensable visual archive: it preserves detailed evidence of Central Asian life, crafts, and monuments in the late 19th century, much of which would be impossible to recover otherwise.
Abstract
Though the deportation of the Armenians of Julfa during the 1604 "Great Surgun" remains the most prominent example of forced displacement in the seventeenth-century Armenian experience, it represents but a single star in a broader constellation of razed cities along the Ottoman-Safavid frontier. This paper explores why Julfan memory remained uniquely resilient, arguing that its prominence was a deliberate construction of the Vardapetk’ (scholarly priests) of New Julfa. By establishing a scriptorium in the Isfahani suburb as early as 1607, these clerics functioned as a “memory factory,” utilizing the Ołb (city lament) genre to frame their exile in biblical terms—likening Julfa to a latter-day Jerusalem and the Julfans to the exiled Judeans. In doing so, the Julfan authors participated in a continuous literary tradition that had previously chronicled the falls of cities such as Jerusalem (1187), Edessa (1144), and Tabriz (1585). By consistently evoking the Book of Lamentations, the Ołb genre enabled the Vardapetk’ to interpret their communal plight through the framework of a “Chosen People” suffering from divine punishment. Furthermore, the model of the Judeans in Babylonian captivity provided a template for the Armenian community in exile to retain its distinct Apostolic faith and, by extension, its communal identity. Crucially, these writers were not exclusively Julfan; rather, the Diocese of New Julfa was a central hub for the clerical diaspora, which allowed for a broader Armenian identity to be subsumed under a centralized Julfan idiom. Through the analysis of works by scribes such as Hovhannes Makuetsi, Nerses of Bitlis, and Davit’ Gałametsi, I demonstrate how the Diocese utilized medieval themes of łaribut'iwn (exile) and pandxtut'iwn (uprootedness), to create a dialectic between displacement as a permanent historical condition and the sanctity of the homeland left behind. Ultimately, I also consider how this diocesan project reverberated beyond the page; by constructing churches that remapped the sacred topography of Old Julfa onto the Isfahani suburb, the Vardapetk’ effectively "imported Zion" to Safavid Iran.
Abstract
This paper analyzes the strategies, directions and instruments of the soft power policies pursued by Turkey and China in Central Asia. Both states have focused their main attention on education, language, and culture, which serve as the main tools of their soft power policy in these areas. The theoretical framework of the research is based on the concept of soft power developed by Joseph Nye. In addition, in the study was discusses the interpretations of soft power proposed by Chinese and Turkish scholars. The research methodology is based on content analysis and case study methods. The linguistic and cultural activities of the Confucius and the Yunus Emre Institutes were examined using the case study method. Within the framework of Turkey's language policy, particular attention has been given to the issue of adopting a common alphabet. China conducts educational and cultural activities within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Belt and Road Initiative. I argue that the soft power strategies of Turkey and China in Central Asia have a distinctive characteristic: China employs soft power primarily to reinforce its economic and political influence, whereas Turkey utilizes it within the framework of a common ethnolinguistic space and the formation of a common Turkic identity. This research is based on published materials, including reports, official documents, and analytical materials.
Abstract
The image of women was one of the most prominent in early Soviet mythology and was designed to eradicate pre-revolutionary conceptions of femininity. In Central Asian cinema, the figure of the “liberated woman of the East” emerged as a symbolic opposition to traditional ways of life. Early Soviet films frequently centered on a woman’s transformation from a victim of the old (traditional) life into a “new woman.” Through mise-en-scène, costume, and narrative resolution, these films constructed new models of female behavior and introduced new moral norms, modes of thinking and speaking, and everyday practices, as exemplified in Muslim Woman (1925), Second Wife (1926), Jackals of Ravat (1927), The Veil (1927), The Leper Girl (1928), Without Fear (1972), and Fiery Roads (1977–1984).
After independence, post-Soviet rhetoric permeated Central Asian cinema, as filmmakers turned to the reassessment of Soviet history and collective memory. Films revisiting the Soviet past sought to offer alternative perspectives on pivotal historical moments and the social movements that shaped women’s status. In this context, cinema critically engaged with the legacy of Soviet modernization, highlighting tensions between ideological reform and cultural tradition (The Speaker (1999), Her Right (2020), 2000 Songs of Farida (2020), etc.).
This paper examines Soviet and post-Soviet representations and interpretations of the “new woman” in films, short videos, and documentaries. It argues that women’s bodies function as key cinematic sites where ideology, historical memory, and competing models of femininity are visually negotiated across different political epochs.
Abstract
This paper explores the phenomenon of cultural synthesis in the decorative arts of the Timurid period (14th–15th centuries), focusing on how artistic traditions of Transoxiana (Mawarannahr) and the broader Islamic world interacted and transformed within a unified visual system.
The Timurid era represents a key moment in the development of Central Asian art, characterized by the convergence of diverse cultural influences and the formation of a new artistic language. This study examines how elements of earlier local traditions were reinterpreted and combined with wider artistic practices, resulting in a coherent yet complex visual culture.
Particular attention is given to ornament as one of the most expressive mediums through which this synthesis becomes visible. Through the analysis of ornamental structures, compositional principles, and stylistic features, the paper demonstrates how decorative forms reflect processes of continuity, adaptation, and innovation.
The research is based on formal and stylistic analysis, supported by historical context. Rather than treating decorative arts as secondary, the study positions them as central to understanding broader cultural transformations in the Timurid period.
By focusing on synthesis as a dynamic and multi-layered process, this paper contributes to discussions on cultural interaction, artistic identity, and the development of visual language in Central Eurasia.
Abstract
Aitys is a very important part of Kazakh oral literature and culture, which has historically played a key role in expressing collective values, public opinion, and social critique. As a genre of improvised poetic competition accompanied by the dombra, it combines elements of rhetoric, satire, and performance, allowing aityskers to engage directly with social, political, and cultural realities. Their performances often address current issues, reflect moral values, and, importantly, provide space for both explicit and implicit critique of authority.
This research is aimed at analyzing the thematic transformation of aitys. Following Dubuisson (2010), this study approaches aitys as a space that is not fully controlled by dominant ideology, but rather one where performers retain a certain degree of agency and are able to negotiate, reinterpret, and sometimes challenge power structures through poetic expression.
The empirical basis of the study consists of a corpus of aitys texts drawn from the Anthology of Kazakh Art. The analysis combines thematic analysis with automated text analysis methods. By focusing on the quantitative dimension, this study seeks to complement existing research on aitys, which has been predominantly qualitative.
Through a comparative analysis of texts from different historical periods, the study examines how key themes, motives, and rhetorical strategies change depending on the socio-political context. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which akyns express identity, articulate social criticism, and adapt to ideological constraints. The findings are expected to demonstrate that aitys is not only a form of cultural heritage, but also a dynamic medium that reflects broader social transformations. The use of automated text analysis makes it possible to identify patterns and shifts in narratives that are less visible in traditional approaches, contributing to a deeper understanding of the evolution of aitys and its role in society.
Abstract
Representations of Water in Modern and Contemporary Art from Kazakhstan
Inga Lāce, curator, Almaty Museum of Arts
This talk looks at paintings from natural landscapes to industrial scenes, exploring how water has been represented in modern and contemporary art from Kazakhstan. Meaning of water has shifted across different historical and artistic contexts and depending on the artists. From depictions of rivers, lakes, and the steppe’s scarce water sources in Soviet-era painting to works celebrating industry on rivers and lakes, to more conceptual and critical approaches in contemporary practices, water emerges as both material and metaphor.
The talk considers water as a site of memory, ecological concern, and political imagination, reflecting on issues such as environmental transformation, resource extraction, and the legacy of dedication of the Aral Sea and industrialisation of Lake Balkhash. At the same time, it examines how artists engage with water in relation to nomadic cosmologies, ritual practices, and everyday life.
Bringing together works from the collections of Almaty Museum of Arts, alongside broader regional practices, the presentation proposes water as a lens through which to understand the entanglement of landscape, identity, and history in Kazakhstan.
Abstract
The Silk Road of Central Eurasia had a distinctive kind of space where cultures met, intellectual traditions intersected, and trade networks took place, thereby reassigning meaning and movement to the rich, diverse history of the land. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s reflections on dwelling, alētheia (unconcealment), and Gelassenheit (releasement), the author intends to reinterpret space through a distinctly philosophical lens. The scholar seeks to answer the question of how Silk Road hubs such as Samarkand, Bukhara, and Kashgar can be rethought as “gathering” spaces rather than only as backdrops to trade.
The scholar in her research employs a conceptual and interpretative methodology with an emphasis on phenomenological textual analysis. The philosophical texts by Heidegger, especially “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” and related essays on technology and space, along with references to selected historical and travel accounts, will reconstruct how these sources describe movement, staying, and encounter in ways that resonate with or challenge high understanding of space as constituted by dwelling, not merely by coordinates of property. The paper will address the following questions: Can we view the Silk Road not as a corridor of commerce, but as a space of relational dwelling? In what ways do the Silk Road gatherings resemble the gathering spaces that Heidegger associates with poetic and non-instrumental forms of dwelling? How do we look at spaces that are shaped by modern technological framing (Gestell)? The scholar further raises the question of what implications this interpretation will have for contemporary debates about borders, migration, and environmental belonging in an age of digital and economic abstraction.
By focusing on these philosophical questions, the paper seeks to understand and show how Central Eurasian crossroads can contribute to a broad philosophy of space, in which one comes across hospitality, openness, and the rethinking of place as relational and process-oriented in the global interconnected world. The conclusion will focus on how Silk Road is not only limited to regional study, but also as a conceptual resource for rethinking how humans inhabit and share space in an interconnected world
Abstract
The historiography of the Silk Road has long focused primarily on the northern and central trans‑Eurasian routes linking China with Central Asia and the Mediterranean world. In this dominant narrative, the southern corridors that connected Iran, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian subcontinent have received comparatively limited scholarly attention. This paper introduces and develops the concept of the “Jade Road” as an analytical framework for reconsidering the role of southern Silk Road networks in the historical formation of Central Eurasian space.
Drawing on Persian and Arabic historical sources, geographical literature, and commercial records, this study examines the routes that connected Khurasan, southern Iran, the Persian Gulf ports, and the markets of the Indian subcontinent. These routes constituted an important system of exchange through which commodities such as horses, precious stones including jade, textiles, and other luxury goods circulated across regions. At the same time, these networks enabled the movement of merchants, administrators, scholars, and religious figures, facilitating broader processes of cultural and social interaction.
Particular attention is given to the Mongol period in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the political integration of large parts of Eurasia under Mongol rule significantly enhanced long‑distance mobility and commercial exchange. During this period, southern routes linking Iran with India gained renewed importance within the wider Eurasian trade system. The paper argues that these networks played a key role in connecting Central Asia with the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean world, thereby reshaping patterns of economic geography and regional connectivity.
By proposing the concept of the “Jade Road,” this study seeks to highlight the importance of southern Silk Road corridors in the spatial reconfiguration of Central Eurasia. Reconsidering these routes allows for a more balanced understanding of Eurasian historical connectivity and emphasizes the role of Iran and the Persian Gulf as critical intermediaries between Central Asia and the Indian Ocean world