Wandering poetics of Central Asian mestizas
Interview with Krëlex Zentre
by Victoria Kravtsova
20th November 2019
Victoria Kravtsova
Maria, Ruth, thanks for this conversation happening! Let us start with your background. How did you start as artists and as curators, and what led you to the point you are now at with Krëlex Zentre?
Maria Vilkovisky
I have a classical education in music, I graduated from a conservatory and had been working in the musical theatre - before I stopped doing it completely at the moment I met Ruth. This was about 12 years ago, 2009 or so.
Ruth Jenrbekova
It was 2005 when our friend Denis Kolokol started a series of experimental music events and then an international festival of electronic music and media art in 2006 and 2007 in Almaty. After participating in this we began to work together. Experimental music was our common sphere — we both were musicians. Masha came from the side of a rather classical approach and poetry and I had an interest in synthesizers and was doing DJing. We began to do things together as “an artistic duo of an undetermined number of participants”.
Maria Vilkovisky
So as artists, we began with experimental music and performance. For example, our project Lecture on John Cage consisted of a four-hours long happening in a theatre, a “counter-monument” park installation and a musical album.
Victoria Kravtsova
And how did you decide to start Krëlex Zentre? Where does the name come from?
Maria Vilkovisky
I got a job at the creative space “L.E.S” (“Forest”) where I was to be responsible for cultural content. We held several events there and then understood that in order to be not just “creative”, but also an independent artist-run space, “L.E.S” needs some theoretical grounds and concrete artistic policy. Then Krёlex Zentre appeared as an ideological platform, as an agenda we were interested in.
Ruth Jenrbekova
It was our version of feminist identity politics. In Kazakhstan, we always had some issues with identity. Some think that we live in Kazakhstan and we are Uighurs, Russians, Germans, Kazakhs, but it is clear for me that there is no one like that, there are only people with passports. And so we started to use the metaphor of creoleness. I began to think about it because my family is a mixed one. And then I began to think how is it linked to colonization and look into the experiences of the peoples of the Caribbean. I found a book by Édouard Glissant (Poetics of Relation) where he writes about creolization and creoleness in connection to exile, errantry, nomadism, opacity and this “wandering poetics” seemed quite appropriate to our situation in Kazakhstan.
Maria Vilkovisky
Yes, in Kazakhstan cultural institutions are marked on a basis of the nationality: Russian Theatre, Alliance Française, Uighur Cultural Center and many more. But, what can those do, who do not want to be narrowed to one nationality or ethnicity? Creoleness for us is a mix of practices that happened in art, politics, philosophy, sociology.
Ruth Jenrbekova
Also, we have a strong connection to the concept of “queer”. One of the part of it is that it's all not completely serious - it's funny. Central Asia is not Central America or Southern Pacific or any other former European conquest, where the word “creoleness” historically belongs to. In Kazakhstan it sounds somewhat playful, too literary and artificial, like some kind of a joke. It is not a “solid” identity like Kazakh or Russian, it’s something more like a Jedi, a term for a roleplay. It is a way to talk about the impossibility of identity, of its fictitiousness. It is similar to the term “queer” — a name for those who do not want to define themselves in a particular way.
Victoria Kravtsova
How did it happen that you began to work with the Caribbean decolonial thought?
Ruth Jenrbekova
We were looking for ways to describe the current situation in Kazakhstan. After the country gained independence the question was in the air: how to define it now? There was an attempt to define everything in Kazakhstan as Kazakh - but I couldn’t say this was my culture. I also never would define myself as Russian or Ukrainian or Jew. So we started to look for answers and found the Latin American history. Mexico, the southern underbelly of the US-American empire seemed similar, and the Caribbean as well. I think the relationships between Central Asia and Russia are similar to those between Mexico and the USA. And then I discovered Gloria Anzaldua with her new mestiza who lives in the borderland - this entirely queer creature, in which I recognized myself. It was the same with Glissant, his ideas on Caribbean identity seemed very close to me. I felt there was nothing written here yet. If you would look for reading something from the postcolonial theory of Central Asia - you would not find much. And I began to look where it was reflected. So, in the beginning, what Krelёx Zentre did was adapting theories.
Victoria Kravtsova
Has the situation changed since then?
Ruth Jenrbekova
Since that time activists have appeared and all artists began to speak about the decolonial. The word became hip and everyone began to do projects about the Soviet times, condemning hunger and repressions. There are ethnically Kazakh artists who see decolonization as a struggle with the Soviet legacy. Here, one can rely on Mladina Tlostanova's writings. Her argument — in my simplistic interpretation — reduces the major colonizing power to the Soviets, who suppressed the uniqueness of all cultures other than Russian. We thought that it is more complex and that de-Sovietization does not mean decolonization. These are two different things. Positioning ourselves at the left side of the political spectrum, we cannot agree with such a simplified understanding of decolonization in Kazakhstan: after we get rid of everything Soviet, life will bloom here. I was interested in what to do with the multicultural aspect of the local culture because Kazakhstan was one of the most multinational Republics in the USSR.
Victoria Kravtsova
How then a different decolonial project in Kazakhstan could look like?
Maria Vilkovisky
I think it needs more time to pass. It is a question of the overturn of power. Now it is beneficial to demonize the Soviet heritage because it allows for a position of moral purity and justification of the current political regime. If the elites change, I am sure other opinions will appear. But right now these more complicated opinions are almost not visible. It is also due to a lack of theory — there is no academia of our own here. We need researchers able to describe the situation from the inside.
Ruth Jenrbekova
Different decolonial optics is the one that sees the Soviet period as part of our histories, not as something that was brought here by Russians. Perhaps the new generation will be concerned with the issues of social inequality and interested in revising leftist ideas. For now, art and culture are still perceived as something that has nothing to do with politics in Kazakhstan.
Victoria Kravtsova
Speaking about the connection between local politics and art... There is a broad scope of literature that describes the dependency of contemporary NGOs and cultural institutions on grants. Would you also agree that financial resources determine the agenda of the artist in today’s Kazakhstan? Are you aware of the political agenda of the financial sources in the contemporary art scene in Almaty?
Maria Vilkovisky
Yes, we are, because the main commissioner for arts is our government. Akimat, the government, the Ministry of Culture and Sport, they all are pushing forward their topic which in the end is all about the glorification of a nation-state. Their initiatives are directed to the total depoliticization of artistic production so that it has little to do with the actual agenda anymore. Decolonization in the way I described it above fits into this agenda very well. In this sense, artists are getting influenced by the depoliticizing pressure of cultural institutes. It creates a situation when artists are only able to be critical towards the past, but not towards the present.
In activism, it is of course different. KazFem is pushing forward their own agenda, Feminita is tackling issues they consider important, for instance, research on the needs of LBT-women in Kazakhstan. Feminists, as far as I see, are much more independent from donors and sponsors than artists. Coming to art scene again, I remember a situation which happened several weeks ago. In Astana, (today’s Nur-Sultan — ed.), there was a group exhibition about Soviet repressions and an artist came in a T-shirt You can’t run away from the truth. He was sent away with the explanation that a gallery is not a place for political statements.
Ruth Jenrbekova
The main ideology there is a version of nationalism, the entire idea of sovereignty is built around nationalism in one of its forms. This manipulates the behaviour of artists in a sense that whoever feels oneself relating to this idea gets an opportunity to rail everything Soviet. And who does not fit the framework of the national culture, feels like hanging in the air. It turns out, there is nothing to say for us: as queers and mestizas we do not really exist. Identity becomes equal to history and artists with prescribed ethnicities find their histories always already “national”, but others do not.
Victoria Kravtsova
When and how did you begin to self-identify as feminists?
Ruth Jenrbekova
I came through the reflection on who I am, what kind of relation to Modernity I have as a person from Kazakhstan, a country that was and remains (in some sense) colonized — both inside and outside. Also, the patriarchal way of living and thinking is very strong here, it is impossible to ignore. Out of these questions and problems we began to do our first exhibitions. We also knew that feminist ideas were absent from the discussions. So we decided to do a collective pro-feminist exhibition titled Second Sex.
Maria Vilkovisky
We had one condition for participation: artists were supposed to read Simone de Beauvoir’s book in order to participate in the project. Unexpected for us, we faced certain rejection from the artistic community: many would say “Why do we need this? We don’t have any problems connected to gender issues”. Then we did a round table with the women who have been working against domestic violence since the 1990s and had a more specific understanding of actual feminist issues in our country.
Ruth Jenrbekova
Before the exhibition, we met regularly with participants to look at different examples of feminist art and discuss them. Back then, for artists in Kazakhstan, it was a new way of thinking.
Maria Vilkovisky
At that moment there were no active feminist groups in town, but there was the mentioned above “first generation” of Kazakhstan feminists that worked in NGOs since the beginning of 1990-s and we invited them for a round table in the framework of our exhibition. We felt that there is no connection between different generations of feminists. When Svetlana Shakirova came and saw the artworks, she reacted with “Oh, well, so now the waiting is over - after more than ten years artists start reflecting on feminism”.
Victoria Kravtsova
How to localize feminism in the post-Soviet context?
Ruth Jenrbekova
Through writing our own stuff no matter — whether it is academic or not. Through producing books, films, artworks.
Maria Vilkovisky
“Writing our own stuff” also implies developing our own ways of seeing and writing. I think creating our own language is a political problem and a very long process. So far I cannot imagine a local institution on the basis of which such things could happen.
krëlex zentre is an outline of an art-centre that does not represent a local community, speaking instead on behalf of ‘nobody’: the unclassified multitude of earthlings, the ‘critters’, the translocal queer imaginaries, which have not yet emerged and whose existence is always in question. It can be seen as an artwork in the genre of ‘constructive’ institutional critique – a phantom platform created in response to the situation of local institutional deficiency. It is also an undercover signboard for the various activities of two artists from Kazakhstan: Maria Vilkovisky and Ruthie Jenrbekova.