If you come from the northeast via the well-traveled Almaty road that leads along the Tien Shan mountains and the steppe into the city of Bishkek – or Frunse as it was called in Soviet days – which is located right after the Caucasian border, then the capital of the Republic of Kyrgyzstan looks a little bit like one of the cities you would come to if you drove over the EU border and into the Balkans. Coming here from wealthy Almaty, with over 11% economic growth the region’s boomtown, the center of the republic of 5 million inhabitants seems a bit sleepy.

Since its war of independence in 1991, Kyrgyzstan has had a multilateral political system. Although there are increasing signs that the parliamentary democracy is changing into an authoritarian presidential republic, today Bishkek still conveys the impression of the center of a politically moderate, multicultural, multiethnic, firmly governed state with a bleak outlook in terms of economic development – the average GDP per capita is a grand total of 280 euros. There are hardly any tensions between the 80% Sunni majority in Kyrgyzstan and the minorities, among whom the Russians and Usbeks are the largest at 15% each. Russian has been the second official language since 2000.

Bishkek has endeavored to preserve its Soviet legacy. The center of the capital with its some 750,000 residents is formed by a peculiar monument park, which the Soviets erected starting in the mid-70s. Here, all of the functions that the state party apparatus of the latter Brezhnev period, and subsequently those of Andropov and Chernenko, envisioned as belonging to public life have been transformed into architecture: a huge parade ground, a cultural mile with theater, National Museum, library, youth center, circus, cinema, etc., etc. embedded in a park landscape enriched by sculptured fountains and monuments. This parade of public buildings, engendered by a planning utopia not unlike the Fordist urban vision prevailing in Western Europe, has an autochthonous style that one might refer to as the 2nd Soviet Modern – with regional variations and not without the specific signature of master architects. It was built as if to fill out the voids that contributed to the breakdown of the empire: the voids in individualization, movement, and consumption. One can stroll among these grand edifices without having to confront the reality of the mixture of Stalinist and classicistic place markers, historical buildings, and dilapidated prefab concrete apartment blocks, with their temporary and precarious uses, that actually make up the core of city life here.

Paper architecture
Nevertheless, or perhaps even in reaction to the almost neurotic-seeming building boom of the dying empire, there emerged in Bishkek in the early to mid-80s – just as in Moscow, Novosibirsk, or Kazan – a substantial contribution to the »paper architecture« of the initial postmodern deconstruction fantasies. These endeavored to form a counterpoint to the routine blueprints being produced in the classrooms and studios of the late-modern Soviet architectural industry. The movement was known as paper architecture because it never counted on a chance of being realized. Here was already concealed that unique amalgamation that today makes out the cultural and political climate in many of the successor states of the Soviet republics. This can probably best be described as a variation on Nicos Poulantzas’ formula: territorialization of history and historicization of space, albeit with the addition of the local offshoots of an awkward globalist and internationalist investor style. Out of the spatial fantasies of this paper architecture, which was often evoked as genius loci of primarily nomadic temporary architectures mixed with replicas based on Turkish-Islamic prototypes, or alternatively quoted the constructivism of revolutionary architecture and archeologisms, and was often accompanied by poetic texts and manifestos, sweeping projects are now taking shape in the minds of planners and politicians in a style mix that can best be identified as a national romantic Neo-Art-Deco. But before these plans can be realized, financing must be found.

Ulan Djaparov’s architecture studio is located on the ground floor of one of the ornamented concrete blocks that was even back in Soviet days reserved for the middle classes and the intelligentsia. It’s called »Museum.« A trained architect, Djaparov – together with the internationally active artist duo Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djoumaliev – is the most important motor of the art scene that is working on emancipating itself from the structure of an artists’ union that is still for the most part clinging both aesthetically and policy-wise to the old USSR patterns.

As one of the authors of »paper architecture,« Djaparov himself contributed drafts to the utopian projects and sketched worlds that blossomed in the Perestroika years. His studio is today not only a meeting place for the local intellectuals, for authors and artists, but also functions as the archive for this movement. Here are stored whole exhibitions from those years, with original drawings, models, and posters: monumental spatial rhapsodies, utopian drafts for architectures liberated from function, sculptural models. Less fantasy-rich is the new everyday work routine of the office community that is concealed behind the label »Museum.« The team labors today under working conditions that could not be more globalized. The project network is made up of self-employed architects living on the edge of economic viability, who draft blueprints for clients from Moscow to Australia, including CAD-free drawings on tracing paper. The local jobs are a very mixed bag. The resident engineer/architect known for his minimalist constructions recently designed and built a mini urban entertainment center – a bowling alley.

Postmodern in the post-empire
Although, as mentioned before, the official art culture is still determined by the conservatives in the artists’ union, much has changed on Bishkek’s art scene since the late 90s. In 1998 Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djoumaliev founded the group »Zamana«, which developed an interactive installation called »The Wall of Talking Clay« for the Soros Festival in Bishkek. The Soros Centers play a similar role in the region as they did following the regime changes in Eastern Europe. They implement a specific Western-oriented concept of contemporary art and new media, which is then often hybridized with local elements. »Zamana« also showed works at the first large-scale exhibition at the Soros Center of Contemporary Art in Almaty in 2000, an important kick-off project for the region since it brought many curators and artists there who ended up forming a series of networks. Sabine Vogel’s longstanding connections in this region, which were later brought together in the exhibition »No Mad\'s Land« in Berlin, found an important rallying point here, and international attention was gained for curators like Julia Sorokina and their local work.

A Swiss art city
In addition to his work as architect, Djaparov publishes the only art magazine in the region, »Kurama Art Bulletin,« and also acts in poetic radical performances, as well as putting on a biennial. Although Japan, the USA, and Germany have invested the most in the development of the country, Djaparov also receives funding from a Swiss institution, as does Leeza Ahmady, an Afghani living in exile in New York, who brought a show of video art by New York emigrants to Bishkek in 2004.

With an annual budget of some 300,000 euros, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, set up under the aegis of the Swiss foreign office, is one of the foremost cultural investors in the country. The work of its »Arts and Culture Programme in Kyrgyzstan« provides the most telling example of the fault lines in the present situation – between official representatives of contemporary art, foreign-financed elites, and state culture. The prestige project supported by the Swiss bears the English title »City of Artists.« It is a studio house complex on the outskirts of the monumental inner city. The artists’ city features a large exhibition hall, probably the most important one besides the National Museum. The City is directed by a still-life painter of the realism-infused Cezanne faction, who made his career in the old artists’ union, and an enthusiastic young culture manager. They both take a very serious approach to the assignment of their Swiss sponsors to teach the local arts scene »how to exist in a market economy - how to organize arts promotion activities, arts management, public relations and fund-raising.« The house is therefore usually full of diverse local, marketable proto-modern paintings, along with kitschy canvases bearing heavy traces of the palette knife, and objects placeable somewhere between arte povera and folklore. Here in Central Asia virtually every conflict can be discovered once again that in late-90s Europe placed cultural policy back in the hands of the foreign offices and made it into a mechanism for ideological political control.

In »The Others,« an exhibit curated by Djaparov together with Elena and Victor Vorobyev from Kazakhstan, which ran concurrently with the imported videos from New York, the first prize was won by a painter and graphic artist working in the gestural expressive mode whose name stands internationally for the abstract turning point of the late Soviet days: Valery Rumpel. He did not receive the prize for one of his pictures, however, but instead for a video. Rumpel, who like his painter colleague Adis works in the City, is a silent hero of the local scene - a painter animated by the image of the artist as a seeker of the truth in form and gesture. In »Winter Performance« he shows two boys who are playing soccer on a snow-covered field in front of the steeply rising mountainous backdrop surrounding Bishkek. Instead of a ball, they kick around a rusty old teakettle, the symbol of Kyrgyzstan-style hospitality. In the city’s studios, in which working on concepts of modernity has not necessarily become any easier since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a new idea is currently being discussed. The artists envision the city as the center of a cultural nation that is to play a prominent role in the Eurasia to come. A political theme, or a chimera that helps to compensate for the loss of empire?

 

Translated by Jennifer Talyor-Gaida

 

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