Thursday

Post-Communism and Visual Culture

Filed under Thoughts, Culture/Visual Culture

What happens to a country’s visual culture when it moves from Soviet communism to post-Soviet liberalization? A pathbreaking exhibition in the former Soviet Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan, Epoxa (‘Epoch’) grapples with this question. It presents the republic’s initial independence years, 1991-2005, under the rule of the country’s first post-independence president, Askar Akaev. The Akaev era was brought to an abrupt end by the so-called ‘Tulip Revolution’ of March 2005: after two days of unrest in the capital, following rural mobilization and one night of looting, the president himself fled the country, and a new government headed by Kurmanbek Bakiev took power.

Known internationally also for its rapid liberalization in the 1990s, which earned it the nickname of Central Asia’s ‘island of democracy’ and for being the only Central Asian state to continue to host a US airbase, this small landlocked republic struggles to search for its cultural identity in the twenty-first century. Its population of just over five million is strongly influenced economically and informationally by neighboring China and Russia respectively. For the project’s curator, Gamal Bokonbaev, the sudden change represented: ‘a rejection rather than succession: time lept forward and offered opportunities, encouraged boldness in interpretations.’ How do we interpret what artists did with their new-found political freedom but also the loss of economic subsidization after communist collapse? How did the politics of the era co-exist with these new art forms? Epoxa explores the relationship between visual culture and liberalization through five spheres: film, advertising; painting; modern art; and, photography. Continue…