Kazakhstan's newly opened Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture has unveiled an ambitious approach to decolonization that centers on remembering, rethinking, advancing, and dancing. The center launched its inaugural programming in September with "Barsakelmes," a powerful 90-minute performance that brought together Kazakh visual artists, musicians, poets, and singers in an effort to spiritually summon the lost Aral Sea.
The Aral Sea, once a vast saline lake in Central Asia, was systematically drained during the latter half of the 20th century when the Soviet Union colonized the region and diverted its water sources for agricultural projects. Today, only a salty depression remains where the sea once flourished. The opening performance took its name from Barsakelmes, formerly the largest island in the Aral Sea, which became the subject of local legends about a temporal vortex during the Soviet irrigation project. In Kazakh, "Barsakelmes" translates to "If one goes there, one won't return."
"As descendants of the people who first witnessed the signs of the sea's disappearance, we, contemporary Central Asians, have to deal with what is left in the wake of this catastrophe," explained Diana T. Kudaibergen, a cultural and political sociologist and member of the creative advisory board that serves Tselinny instead of a traditional head curator. The performance reinterpreted the legend of Nurtole, a Central Plains hero who tamed serpents and dragons using his sacred kobyz, an ancient Turkic bowed string instrument.
The performance transformed this ancient legend by asking what would happen if the mystical waters of the story were actually the Aral Sea. In this reimagining, the beasts that Nurtole had chained beneath the waters reemerged as a sociopolitical monster, having been starved of song and mutated by Soviet nuclear tests in the region. Recognizing that folk songs alone cannot address modern state problems, the performers incorporated contemporary elements like synthesizers alongside traditional instruments.
The audience, consisting of local and international arts patrons, professionals, and journalists, sat in a half-circle around a monumental multi-colored yurt created by Berlin-based Kazakh visual artist Gulnur Mukazhanova, with additional visuals provided by Darya Temirkhan. The installation served as a portal to the spiritual plane, reminiscent of the legendary Barsakelmes island. Dancers wrapped in white linen moved in and out of the space, following salt lines drawn on the floor, while a traditional throat singer performed songs about families torn apart by historical trauma.
This type of somatic, spiritually powerful performance would be difficult to anticipate in major Western museums operating under capitalist systems. The difference lies in decolonization's requirement for honest public memory about historical events and their meanings, creating something worth fighting for. "Barsakelmes" served as a call to refuse comfort from systems designed to destroy the spirit, urging viewers to examine the most painful parts of history and choose a path that foregrounds Indigenous perspectives.
Kazakhstan gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the same year as Uzbekistan, which recently opened its first international biennial. This gives the country just over 30 years to begin processing the traumatic recontextualization of Central Asian history, including its visual and performing arts traditions. The first generation of Kazakh contemporary artists to emerge post-USSR inherited an enormous task: breaking from propagandistic aesthetics, reestablishing a Kazakh artistic language, and rebuilding connections between Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan.
The Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture was founded in 2018 by Kazakh businessman and entrepreneur Kairat Boranbayev as the nation's first private cultural institution, initially operating under the name Tselinny Temporary. According to director Jamilya Nurkaliyeva, the new Tselinny operates as a horizontal institution with no plans to appoint a head curator or build a permanent collection, distinguishing it from the Almaty Museum of Arts (AMA), a private museum from collector Nurlan Smagulov that also opened in September.
"In my opinion, it is obvious today's leading institutions are no longer concerned with collecting and establishing hierarchies of genres but are looking to create new stories in an open, lively dialogue with the community, primarily the local one, where they can learn, create, and observe," Nurkaliyeva explained. This anti-hierarchical approach was evident in Tselinny Temporary's programming, which focused on personal experiences of societal upheaval rather than rushing to establish a new artistic movement.
The center's 2021 survey exhibition "Here, There, Nowhere" exemplified this approach by gathering multigenerational, multidisciplinary artists united by their irreverent exploration of life in Central Asia during and after independence. Participating artists examined shifting concepts of feminism, the influx of mass-produced goods, and other aspects of post-Soviet transformation. The exhibition included work by Almagul Menlibayeva, a renowned contemporary Kazakh artist who trained in the Soviet realist style before turning to performance and video in the early 2000s.
Tselinny's new home is itself a historical artifact: the former Tselinny cinema building from the Soviet era, which underwent extensive renovation under British architect Asif Khan and his wife and creative partner, Kazakh architect Zaure Aitayeva. The original cinema opened in 1964 to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Soviet transformation of steppe land, primarily in northern Kazakhstan, for grain cultivation. This agricultural project was accomplished by diverting the two major rivers that fed into the Aral Sea, ultimately leading to its destruction.
The building's name derives from the Russian word "tselina," meaning uncultivated or virgin land. Located in Almaty's ideological heart alongside a park, bazaar, and Russian Orthodox Church from the Tsarist era, the cinema became a beloved local gathering place where residents went on first dates. Later, when privatized, it was converted into a multi-function space that included a nightclub.
The building's most treasured feature was the sgraffito decorations created by Soviet graphic illustrator and artist Yevgeniy Sidorkin for the main atrium wall. These decorations depicted Kazakh mythologies, including women dancing to the sounds of a dombra (a traditional stringed instrument), men in traditional Kazakh dress riding horses, and the apple trees that gave Almaty its name. The original glass facade allowed cinema light to illuminate the atrium at night, bringing the sgraffito to life.
Over the years, successive owners and renovations led to the cinema's closure and the sgraffito being replaced with replicas and eventually obscured entirely by the time Khan arrived in 2017. Khan describes the building as a palimpsest whose plaster layers reveal 50 years of shifting ideological, religious, and artistic sentiment in Almaty. The renovation literally peeled back these layers to reveal the original sgraffito behind drywall.
The restored building now features new designs that echo the petroglyphs found throughout Central Asia. The center's inaugural program included an exhibition on the building's regeneration titled "From Sky to Earth," featuring a large table in the foyer filled with documents and objects from Khan's team's research. This research involved an actual road trip through sacred steppe land, documented through photographs, conceptual sketches, and ancient stones.
The building's design emphasizes accessibility and connection to the city. There are no steps at the entrance, which meets the city as a continuous plane, with only a row of white, staggering columns providing subtle division between Almaty and the front door. According to Khan, the facade should evoke the steppe, specifically inspired by a moment witnessed by the Tselinny team: a cloud unleashing torrential rainfall over the great grass plains, which "blued and blurred by atmospheric distance, looked a bit like a bridge."
