How did the ever-changing colonial agenda determine the choice of genres, topics and artistic forms in these pieces to express various political, ethnographic, orientalist and gender tropes and how they are perceived by different observers today? In the context of the discursive strand Comparative Imperialisms, Alexey Ulko presents the development of colonial representation in Central Asia through a series of paintings and photos depicting human bodies in different Central Asian contexts. He begins by looking at Vasily Vereshagin’s Turkestan Series (1873) and how it was exhibited in 2018 at the Tretyakov Gallery. He examines how human figures were depicted in Alexander Volkov and Usto Mumin’s pieces made in the 1920s and 1930s and how human representation varied across the works of other Central Asian artists towards the end of the Soviet period and after that.
The talk will be followed by a discussion of the provided examples and their underpinning narratives to outline a particular segment of the world’s art history. In the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, reactions against the assault emerged in the international cultural space, calling for the ‘decolonisation of Russia’. Ulko proposes an analytical framework for redrafting the history of art and culture with a focus on Central Asian modernity based on five ontological levels at which cultural issues may be identified, particularly in the Central Asian context. These range from superficial ‘cancel Russia’ policies to the affirmation of non-Russian nationalist discourses to the de-normalisation of Russian urban culture and recognition of other syntagmatic and paradigmatic localities.
ABOUT THE Speaker
Alexey Ulko (MEd TTELT) is a consultant on contemporary art, researcher and filmmaker from Samarkand. He has a diverse range of interests, including postcolonial studies, contemporary Central Asian art, new metaphysics, and esotericism. He graduated from Samarkand State University in 1991 and obtained his master’s degree from the University of Exeter in 2001. In recent years, he has authored or contributed to several books, including ἀγάπη (2021), Censoring Art (2018), and Culture Smart! Uzbekistan (2017). He conducted research for the award-winning exhibition We Treasure Our Lucid Dreams (2020) at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. He has co-curated several exhibitions, artistic, musical and educational projects in Central Asia, written over 50 articles and made more than 20 experimental films. He is a member of the Association for Art History, the European Society for Central Asian Studies, and the Central Eurasian Studies Society.