FEATURE

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Destination Asia: Flying over Stereotypes

Often stereotyped in presentation the art of Central Asia has been a much misunderstood category for long. A curatorial intervention has changed it by looking at it through self reflexive lenses. The lands where revolution has become scarce, however still provide the artists with a chance for microscopic scrutiny of the self and belongingness, Amrita Gupta Singh observes.

Destination Asia: Flying over Stereotypes (December 21 2007-January 5, 2008), an exhibition of artists from Central Asia, brought to Project 88, Mumbai by the curatorial team comprising of Valeria Ibraeva (Kazakhstan), Quddus Mirza ( Pakistan) and Sharmila Samant (India), not only introduced to Mumbai, the cutting –edge and politically volatile works of Central Asian artists, but also raised premises about Asian work being exhibited in Asian spaces, rather than in the West, and also how we look at the terminologies of the ‘exotic’ and the ‘orient’, via the Eastern lens. Central Asia has a tumultuous history intrinsically linked with the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, its multi-ethnic demography and its newly independent republics. Its liberalized economy encourages western investment/global capital and questions of identity, nationalism and citizenship are often questioned within the rubric of the traditional and the modern, approached differently in each ethnic community, amidst population dislocation, mass migration, and immigration. The works of the various artists representing Central Asia explore the trajectories of history, memory and subjectivity, re-looking at their roots and challenging stereotypes of what Central Asian-ness means in the popular imagination, which often treats this significant area in the world map as a ‘black hole’, or relegated to history text-books as one of the routes of the ancient Silk Roads.

It would be worthwhile to contextualize its history before examining the works in the exhibition. Central Asia has a history of nomadic pastoralism and warring tribes, to being under the Mongol rule of Ghenghis Khan in the 13th century (the Khans and Emirs claimed direct patrilineal descent from this Mongol ruler), some parts were attached to the Chinese Empire in the 15th century and then under the Russian Empire in the mid-19th century and finally attached to the Soviet Union in the 20th century. The former soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan gained independence in the 1990’s with the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union. While free education, universal schooling and free health were provided by the Soviet government, these republics were also the secret laboratories for nuclear testing and space programs as well as where rich mineral resources, agriculture, oil and gas were produced and extracted for the benefits of the State. In the 1920s and 1930s, there was a large scale destruction of peasant societies accompanied by a wide-ranging program of social engineering, aimed at the rapid modernization and Sovietization of these republics, including the official use of the Russian language, especially in urban centers. In the 1960’s, there was  mass influx of repatriates from China following Sino-Soviet split, in the 1980’s an internal migration of environmental refugees from the former nuclear-testing sites took place and in the post- 1990’s, there has been both internal migrations from rural to urban areas and also exodus of people to other countries. Further, in the 1970’s there were feminist movements via which women played a greater role in the public sphere, and also the secularization of society, where Islam, introduced by the Arabs in the medieval period, is more of a cultural identity than a fundamentalist religious manifestation.

Hence, contemporary Central Asia has a social order of the traditional and the modern, with shamanistic rituals, city Muslim communities, progressive women, socialistic, national and global capitalism. It becomes all the more interesting when one finds similar shared histories with India, given the context of our erstwhile colonized society, post-independence socialist experiments and now a capitalist market, Hindu right-wing fundamentalism and the splits of the traditional and the modern/post-modern that defines contemporary India. With creative practitioners living in such an existential dilemma, art becomes a vehicle via which one can confront everyday beliefs and assumptions, and open out dialectical relationships between various histories and cultures. This is where this exhibition becomes operative, opening out Asian modernisms and post-modernisms, interrogating received meanings of past events and notions of national identity and culture.

The imaginary terrains that Central Asia represents to other cultures are in the form of stereotypes, propagated by the media: Sogd, deserts and oasis, Ghenghis Khan, Syr Darya, Al Beruni, Tamerlan, Samarkhand, Soviet East, space base Baykonur, ‘Kazakh journalist’ – Borat Sagdiev, oil and gas. The distance from European industrial centers and its proximity to unstable and geo-politically explosive countries such as Afghanistan further isolates this region. The artists in this exhibition are from the five republics, both from cosmopolitan urban centers and traditional rural areas. The works consisted of video installations, performance pieces, sculptural installations, and photographs, in a celebration of new media art. It also posited questions of whether the traditional forms of painting or sculpture had any active role to play in today’s context of aggression, uncertainty, and ethnic differences that defines life in most of these republics. In the works, one saw the absurd imprints of Soviet rule, incongruous monuments of the past, issues of labour migration, the State’s indifference to the lives of its own people, almost barbarous in approach, the passivity of the Eastern man, the debates of nature/culture/technology, shamanistic rituals and pagan philosophies. Self-reflexive and critical of the current state of their lands, this exhibition raised questions of fear and hope, where revolutions are scarce, and only individual movements are possible, articulating a microscopic scrutiny of belongingness, traditional and colonial heritages, and anxieties of the Self within competing identities.