A history in acts and gestures: Performance, Central Asia and the Caucasus

With such a diverse range of participants, the discussions and performances in A history in acts and gestures took multiple routes. Yet amid this variety, a clear thematic anchor emerged: the notion of the body. In what follows, I consider three dimensions of this theme: the physical body in space, the spiritual body in time and the absent body. Each was shaped by shared acts of resistance, reappraisal of cultural traditions, collective world-building and the expansion of what performance can be within these regions.

First is the physical body: the body that resists and endures. The 1990s in Georgia, marked by civil war and economic collapse, were a key focus of writer and curator Vija Skangale’s presentation. Through rarely seen archival material, she examined how the upheaval of that decade informed Georgian performance art, particularly the artworks of Mamuka Japaridze and Chubika, and the collectives 10th Floor, Archivarius and Vardzia Art Group. Skangale also reflected on what it means to re-enact those historical performances today, at another moment of regional instability. Similarly, Angela Harutyunyan, Professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, discussed early performance art in Armenia across three paradigms; late perestroika, early independence and the early 2000s, highlighting figures such as the ‘3rd Floor’ movement, Group Act collective and David Kareyan. Across these contexts, she argued, performance emerged as ‘opposition and resistance to dominant political and cultural discourses’.

By the 2000s, the physical body also became a performed, mediated, and perceived one. Kazakhstani curator and researcher Yuliya Sorokina provided an extensive overview of Central Asian contemporary art, linking her own curatorial experience to the legacies of artists Bakhyt Bubikanova, Sergei Maslov, Rustam Khalfin, Lidia Blinova, Yerbossyn Meldibekov, Yelena and Viktor Vorobyovs and the Kyzyl Tractor collective, Vyacheslav Akhunov, Ulan Dzhaparov and Surayo Tuichieva. These practices, sometimes modest in gesture but radical in context, expanded performance into new social and ecological terrains. Afterwards, Irena Popiashvili, Dean and Founder of VA[A]DS at the Free University of Tbilisi, turned attention to theatrical expressions of the body, particularly the performed grief that often masks itself as joy. Using artworks by Mamuka Tsetskhladze and Mamuka Japaridze, she discussed how documentation transforms ephemeral actions into recognised forms of contemporary art – an archive of gestures that might otherwise vanish. During the later discussion, Inga Lāce asked why the vulnerable body seems to appear most vividly in moments of crisis. ‘Raw and honest’, replied Skangale. ‘Resistance’, added Sorokina.

Our bodies are also present in nature; the artistic practices that engage with ecology are inseparable from it. Kyrgyz artists Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev, in conversation with Leah Feldman, reflected on their participation in the last Soviet festival of unofficial art in Narva in 1988 and the transnational solidarity it fostered against Soviet national demarcations. They described their later work with the Zamana art group, whose use of organic materials responded to industrialisation and ecological degradation – as a mode of defiance as material as it was symbolic. Similarly, the Kazakhstani collective Artcom Platform – represented by Aigerim Kapar, Aigerim Ospan and Antonina van Lier – approached ecology through nomadic ways of knowing and embodied engagement with the steppe. Presenting their contribution as a performative contemporary jyr (Kazakh for ‘song’ or ‘tale’), they wove language, image and sound into a multilingual reflection on ‘bodies as archives’ – performance as a practice of care, knowledge-making and solidarity. ‘As a living practice of storytelling’, they said, ‘jyr carries ancestral knowledge across generations, sustaining continuity through performance and collective listening’.

This idea of ancestral continuity leads to the second dimension: the spiritual or ethereal body in time. Members of the Kyzyl Tractor collective – Said Atabekov, Arystanbek Shalbayev and Smail Bayaliyev – discussed their longstanding practice that began in the late 1980s, as one that connects the physical present with the spiritual realm of dala (Kazakh for ‘steppe’), an epistemic and ancestral space. In conversation with Diana Kudaibergen, Lecturer in Central Asian Politics and Society at UCL, they reflected on the porous boundary between daily life and the spiritual realm. This was enacted when Shalbayev staged a witty impromptu performance: mid-discussion on death and transgression, he rose to offer an apple to Dina Akhmadeeva but collapsed midway, carried away by his fellow members. The apple rolled right into Akhmadeeva’s hands – a perfectly realised gesture of passage between worlds and generations.

Such merging of the physical and the spiritual shaped the panel ‘Resonances of Belonging: Sonic Roots and Sonic Presence’, co-convened by Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture, and a significant part of which focused on the large-scale performance BARSAKELMES. The project – dicussed by Tselinny’s Artistic Director Jamilya Nurkalieva, musicologist Yermek Kazmuhambet, artists SAMRATTAMA, Anuar Duisenbinov and Zere, and academic Diana Kudaibergen – demonstrated how ancestral heritage can be re-situated in contemporary form. Combining music, sound, narrative, ritual and dance, BARSAKELMES became a gesamtkunstwerk where ancient motifs turned into living performance.

The third and final aspect is the absent body: the body withdrawn, or dispersed. Artist and curator Ruben Arevshatyan offered a moving tribute to the artist Hamlet Hovsepian, ‘one of the most distinctive figures of the Armenian 1980s’; the artist – but more importantly, the friend – who was no longer there. Hovsepian’s practice, Arevshatyan said, lay precisely in removing his body from ideological visibility, focusing instead on ‘the essence of the insignificant’. By turning away from both official and counter-official art, Hovsepian resisted the binary of meaning and meaninglessness, repositioning himself in counteraction to kitsch and meaning-producing ideologies that barely carried any weight in the perestroika period.

The absent body was also central to several projects the Tselinny Center discussed during the symposium: Korkut Sonic Arts Triennale / Re-Practice, Şu Şaşu and CTM Lab x Korkut. Artists Anuar Duisenbinov, Syrlybek Bekbotayev, Medina Bazarğali, Lovozero and theatre producer Ännäs Bağdat explored sonic practices as a medium that transcends the physical, where sound replaces corporeal presence. Similarly, Elena Razlogova, Associate Professor of History at the University of Montreal, examined the conventions of live simultaneous translation into multiple languages during the Tashkent Film Festival in Soviet-period Uzbekistan. Through questions of translation – linguistic, cultural and temporal – Razlogova proposed that sound and language themselves might serve as transnational, transhistorical bodies.

If the panels revolved more around the presence and absence of the body, the live performances shared another common thread: an exploration of the possibilities of the spoken word. Every performance – even those concerned with invisibility – engaged with it. Georgian artist Ana Gzirishvili’s video performance Central Market (3), apart from the projected moving image, featured only her voice; a text read by Gzirishvili live from within the audience, the artist herself unseen. Bazarğali’s performance staged a ‘live coding’ aitys (the Kazakh tradition of poetic and musical competition or debate) between her voice reading her spoken word poetry and the improvised algorithmic process of her computer. Armenian-Lithuanian artist and composer Andrius Arutiunian presented an excerpt from his ongoing project Gharīb, performing on electronics and a handmade brass instrument while reciting a text that ‘reflects on seven methods of disappearance’, his body becoming a canvas for light reflected off the instrument’s surface. And, finally, Georgian-born interdisciplinary artist Uta Bekaia, in collaboration with Leah Feldman, reintroduced the body again in full through (Supra)National, a performative reworking of the Georgian supra ritual and the tamada toastmaster’s role. Around a round table sat Feldman, as well as some of the speakers and artists heard across the two days: Aigerim Kapar, Vija Skangale and Irena Popiashvili, paralleled by costumed ‘deities’ played by Kazakhstani artists sa sha cherezova, Gali and Violetta Bogdanova, and Almaty Museum of Arts curators Marzhan Alpysbayeva and Akzharkyn Kumarbayeva. Then, suddenly, started Bekaia: ‘My body has always been a subject of war’. One by one, the speakers offered their stories and toasts. The deities then took their places, and the word passed to the audience, invited to the table to give their toasts and reflections. Nearly all in the room spoke one by one. The symposium closed with the voices of those who had been present as listeners throughout the two days being heard and considered.

Among the final reflections, Kyzyl Tractor’s Smail Bayaliyev spoke of feeling a stronger connection between generations than ever before, a testament to both the symposium’s and the new museum’s role as a shared ground for exchange. That sentiment captures the success of A history in acts and gestures. Through the body – physical, spiritual or absent – the symposium bridged times, languages and ecologies, revealing performance art in Central Asia and the Caucasus as not only a potent creative practice but also a living act of continuity, resistance and will.