A Visit to Almaty by Hakan Topal

Written by Hakan Topal, a member of the imam@xurban_collective

At the beginning of July, I visited Bishkek for a public art symposium organized by B’sek Art Center. After finalizing my work, I decided to visit Almaty, which is 3 hours away from Bishkek.

The road to Almaty was an inspiring experience with towering mountains on one side, and endless steppes on the other, thousands of kilometers of smooth surfaces, like the sea—somewhat wavy, sometimes rough, offered an amazing unobstructed view. It would be fascinating to stroll through this landscape, day and night, very calming… perhaps next time, for another occasion!

I was fortunate that prior to my visit to Almaty, Defne Ayas introduced me to the artists and curators based there, which made my short visit very enjoyable. Alexander Ugay was a very kind host. We quickly realized that we share many common issues although we are situated in very different parts of the world. Together with him I visited some art spaces and various other parts of the city.

It was obvious that Kazakhstan is undertaking a big renovation project—as roads, signs, and buildings are being refurbished—things looks much newer than Kyrgyzstan. Renovation is not a radical break from the past (at least in architectural terms) it is a reformation of an existing structure, it can be used as a strategy to readapt spaces for different uses and it may add new functionalities.

The National Museum, like the one in Bishkek was built in Soviet times and holds a relatively rich collection of paintings and sculpture. It was nice to see that there are cultural producers, like curator Yulilya Sorokina, developing exciting new programmes. However it was sad to hear that it was very hard for her to bypass strong conservative state bureaucracy and her operational freedom is extremely limited, if not censored! Like the whole country, the museum is also under renovation. In front of the building there were newly constructed fountains, which seemed very foreign in relation to the main building. It was like a forced marriage, modern architecture with a neo-conservative backdrop. It is a counterfeit addition because when you get closer to the fountain, you realize that it is made out of fiber similar to the ones in Las Vegas and pretending to be stone. Whether you like it or not, you have to appreciate that soviet architecture and its urban design has something very consistent about it.

You see these new additions all over Almaty, some of them built by Turkish construction firms, perhaps that is why they looked familiarly intimidating to me. For instance, an Eifel tower in front of a building is signaling marvelous developments in Astana, the new capital, constructed from ground up, 1000 km north of Almaty. It is as though a puzzled dream is actually being realized as an eclectic phantasmagoria.

This is the new status-quo, preserved by an authoritarian market economy, so called “patriarchal neo-liberalism”. Alex was rightly pointing out that the abundant Kazak natural resources have a negative effect on its livelihood. Wealth earned from gas and petroleum is not shared and kept by the few (oh how surprising!). As production sites close and creative productivity is all together left out from the public agenda, people are transformed into mere consumers, totally dependent on outside production. Like oil rich Arab countries, money from natural resources is the negation of actual creative production, it permanently alters the quality of labor, replaces it with cheap or expensive imports, and the general culture is transformed so that it can serve the kitschy taste of the nouveau-riches. That is why perhaps this new poverty of x-soviet countries is coming from their absolute richness of their natural resources, like a curse needing to be overcome. That is why we, together with other cultural producers around the world, have enormous intellectual responsibilities to fulfill, like fighting this ugly authoritarianism(s).