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Changing Climate
New Media and Video Art from Central Asia

Location: Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna
Period: 25November-25 December, 2009

Participants:
Veaceslav Ahunov, Abilsaid Atabekov, Shaarbek Amankul, Ulan Djaparov, Rustam Khalfin, Mumtoz Kamolzoda, Erbolsyn Meldibekov, Alexandr Ugay

Exhibition curated/designed by: Stefan Rusu

The exhibition presents artists’ strategies and contemporary art practices that serve as an effective tool in exploring the contradictions and confusion of contemporary Islamic states/societies several decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Block. We invite you to dive into these artists’ laboratory, in which the reuse of spiritual techniques and practices becomes an effective model in articulating critical attitudes toward inertia, rampant globalization, and neo-liberal anarchy. The artists’ obsession with ecstatic vocabulary comes from a range of nomadic rituals, pre-Islamic and syncretic practices that define their lives and cultural environment. The work urges the viewer to gain an overview of the present situation in Central Asia. Compiled by a guest curator, this visual material offers a retrospective look at the internal processes of the region’s social-political evolution and its underlying cultural background. With this action we intend to broaden and deepen the process of cultural exchange between Europe and Central Asia.

The selection of artist positions with a special focus on new media and video art from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan is an attempt to question former and ongoing EU policy developments in the context of emerging black markets and the migration of labour forces from the Eastern Europe, Caucasus, Central Asia—and also the effects of EU enlargement and politics on neighbouring countries to the East. In this context the artists exploring the values of nomadic culture offer valuable contributions for changing the ongoing cultural and political climate.