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Devashish Sharma < Back Immovable Object /Unstoppable Force Devashish Sharma Bangalore, India Hidden from view by the forest, about two kilometres from where I stay runs a highway, and at night once things are quiet, it is possible to hear the low hum of vehicles as they move across the landscape. I stay on the southern side of rural Bangalore, about seventeen kilometres from the city centre. For the past few weeks I haven’t heard the vehicles at night – only the occasional barking deer or an owl, and at times the sound of rustling of dry leaves, and the snapping of twigs as wild boars and other animals roam the forest late at night in search of food. Birds 1, Home, Valley, 3rd April .wav Download WAV • 15.27MB Birds 1, Home, Valley, 3rd April The past three weeks have been difficult for me, and catastrophic for some; India has been under lockdown. Being away from the city, I haven’t been able to see the empty streets that my friends tell me about, or witness the migration of people as they walk back home. The lockdown has also brought with it a set of unintended consequences; people from around the world have reported how nature has reclaimed spaces that humans had polluted; air in the most polluted cities has become breathable again. Listening to these descriptions, I feel incredibly happy, but there is also a sense of guilt. I wonder what is the future of cities. Do they need to be more like villages- smaller in size and more self-sustaining? There is also the possibility that we transition into a society where hyper-surveillance becomes legalized. Is the Pandemic a Portal? The models for cities in India have failed and industries globally have done more damage to the environment than we can possibly repair in our lifetime. It is imperative that we stop and contemplate new ways of living. As Latour, Arundhati Roy and others urge us to treat the pandemic as a portal to reconsider systems of production, I find it quite difficult to isolate activities that I would not want coming back, or that I would want started, or accelerated. Ideally I would like to live in an environmentally sustainable society; where every person has good food, a nice place to stay, good education, and an enjoyable job – overall a healthy lifestyle. But how can these ideals be translated into action? Which activities must I stop in my life, and which must I initiate or accelerate to move closer to this ideal society? And if we were to do this collectively, won’t the cessation of a few of these activities destabilise the already precariously placed ecological and economic systems that we are a part of? At the same time, this uncertainty shouldn’t become an excuse for inaction, to postpone action until a later date when things seem clearer. How do we negotiate this change? Will a new system of production really reduce or negate the possibility of ecological and social catastrophe? What is the fundamental cause of this problem? Is the human mind geared to produce societies that are doomed to fail? Perhaps the solution lies in understanding how we produce these systems, and letting our lives organically evolve from this understanding. What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? It is surprising how fragile everything is; our bodies, the plants around us, the streams, lakes, the buildings, even the economy in which we put such trust. Looking back, there are innumerable examples of civilisations that have vanished- entire cities abandoned, and buried under the unceasing flow of time. These were civilisations, just like ours, that probably didn’t considered the possibility that one day the structures that they had built would collapse. Is that where we are headed? If not forgotten, we might be remembered as the generation that could have done something to prevent the imminent ecological disaster. As I sit to think about the future, I am faced with an even more basic question – what is time? How do I understand it? And how does it structure my response to my environment? I have a feeling that the answer to the question of production lies in our understanding of time and thought. As a society we have become preoccupied with accumulating both wealth and knowledge. This might be attributed to our understanding of time. Thinking about time is important because that is what lays the foundation for our systems of production, distribution and consumption of products and ideas. It is possible that in the desire for a better tomorrow we have neglected our present. The current crisis offers us the opportunity to sit quietly, observe our minds, and to understand how we think – to think about thinking. I suspect that the very nature of thought is aggressive, and anything that is born out of thinking is bound to posses its very basic nature. Perhaps, right now the most pertinent question that faces humanity is, can we think without being selfish? Otherwise, any system- political, economic, or artistic, while attempting to be selfless, will ultimately be a sophisticated way of gaining control over material resources and people. I am reminded of a riddle we used to ask as children- What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? In the current ecological crisis are we the unstoppable force, and nature the immovable object? Or is nature the unstoppable force and we the immovable object? Is that what we are witnessing; the collision of an unstoppable force with an immovable object? Devashish Sharma has a BFA in Painting from the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, and an MFA from the Shiv Nadar University, Greater Noida. Previous Next

Open Call | The Unlearning Curriculum 2024 Application deadline: June 20, 2024 Inform of selected participants: July 10-15, 2024 Intensive dates: August 17-23, 2024 The Unlearning Curriculum in 2024 is a five-day intensive conceived for cultural workers, artists, curators, writers and researchers who share interest in practicing different methodologies of working within art and culture. It aims at exploring methodologies based on decolonial principles, and ways of knowing that engage not only mind but also our whole body and a variety of senses. It is a process of co-learning and un-learning, and of challenging the divide of culture, nature and human. By “staying with the trouble”, as Donna Haraway states, we may recuperate alternative literacy, tools and relations to cultivate an ecology oriented to the future. We will spend days and nights together by sharing common space and time through learning, reflecting, making, listening led mentors but also all the participants. During these five days we will decentralize our position as urban dwellers, and address the eco-social crisis from the perspectives of practical hope, to recover the collective input of local community and knowledge. The intensive is situated in an old village nearby Taishan in Guangdong province of China. The building has been renovated and sustained by Huan Jiajun, who is an activist of conserving the local culture. Taishan is historically home for a lot of overseas Chinese, who emigrated to north America to work as indentured workers in plantations, mines and railways in late 19th century and early 20th century. The architecture of the village preserves such diasporic history in its synthetic style. * The intensive is conceived and initiated by Biljana Ciric and Nikita Yingqian Cai; organized by Guangdong Times Museum and “What Should/Could Curating do?”; and generously supported by De Ying Foundation. This intensive is a greate opportunity, if you are: Interested in learning from others and from nature, and generous in sharing; Willing to engage in disciplines and conversations beyond your educational or academic training; Willing to share your insights and specialties with others, including but not restricted to yoga, knowledge of nature, craft-making, cooking etc. Requirements: A short bio including your educational background and recent experiences in cultural or social projects; A short intention letter (less than 500 words) which states what you would like to learn and unlearn with others; Your contact info including email, mobile and social media account. Fee: 3800 RMB or 490 EUR (The fee includes meals and accommodation of the five days; transportation from your city of residence to Taishan/China is not included） Please be noted: The Unearning Curriculum is open for local and international participants; The intensive will take place at Tosen’s Garden, Paobu Village, Taishan City, Guangdong, P.R. of China ; The working language is English; All participants are expected to arrive no later than August 17th and to commit to the whole duration; Further information about international or domestic travel will be provided after your enrollment is confirmed; Detailed information on day-by-day activities will be notified once all participants are confirmed. Tasks for preparations will be shared and discussed by zoom meeting in July; After the intensive in Taishan, additional visits to independent spaces, studios and institutions in Guangzhou will be organized in the following 2 days. The visits are not part of the curriculum, and you need to plan your stay and cover your own expences in Guangzhou. Please apply by submitting the following materials to contact@timesmuseum.org by June 20, 2024 and visit www.timesmuseum.org for further information. About mentors Amelie Aranguren (she/her) has been a member of Inland since 2011. Campo Adentro/Inland is an association and collaborative project that approaches rural issues from an artistic perspective while addressing significant social issues and advocating for the reconnection between rural areas and cities as a basis for sustainable development strategies. She is currently the director of the Center for the Approach to the Rural, a space in Madrid where creators, curators, researchers, and rural agents can engage in production and investigative residencies, and experiment with art forms linked to social contexts and ecological perspectives. Aranguren, along with a team of nine other collaborators, has recently initiated a new association, Paisanaje Project , which explores the capacity of artistic practices in order to address the eco-social crises and inequalities generated from these issues. Aranguren has worked before in institutions as Museo Reina Sofía Madrid, Federico García Lorca Foundation, Madrid and Jeu de Paume, Paris. Nikita Yingqian Cai lives and works in Guangzhou, where she is Deputy Director and Chief Curator of Guangdong Times Museum. She has curated such exhibitions as Times Heterotopia Trilogy (2011, 2014, 2017), Jiang Zhi: If This is a Man (2012), Roman Ondák: Storyboard (2015), Big Tail Elephants: One Hour, No Room, Five Shows (2016) , Pan Yuliang: A Journey to Silence (Villa Vassilieff in Paris and Guangdong Times Museum, 2017), Omer Fast: The Invisible Hand (2018), Neither Black/Red/Yellow Nor Woman (Times Art Center Belin, 2019), Zhou Tao: The Ridge in the Bronze Mirror (2019) and Candice Lin: Pigs and Poison (2021). She initiated the para-curatorial series in 2012 as a paratactic mode of thinking and working, which connects the curated contents of art and culture with pop-up modules of critical inquiry and field curriculum. She has maintained and expanded the research network of “All the Way South” and is the co-editor of On Our Times. She was the participant of de Appel Curatorial Programme (2009-2010) and was awarded the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship in 2019. Her writings have been published by Bard College and the MIT Press, Sternberg Press, Black Dog Publishing, Yishu, Artforum and e-flux. She is the co-editor of Active Withdrawals: Life and Death of Institutional Critique and No Ground Underneath; Curating on the Nexus of Changes. Biljana Ciric is an interdependent curator. She is curator of the Pavilion of Republic of Serbia at 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 presenting with Walking with Water Solo exhibition of Vladimir Nikolic. She is conceiving inquiry for first Trans- Southeast Asian Triennial in Guangzhou Repetition as a Gesture Towards Deep Listening (2021/2022). She was the co-curator of the 3rd Ural Industrial Biennale for Contemporary Art (Yekaterinburg, 2015), curator in residency at Kadist Art Foundation (Paris, 2015), and a research fellow at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (Høvikodden, 2016). Her recent exhibitions include An Inquiry: Modes of Encounter presented by Times Museum, Guangzhou (2019); When the Other Meets the Other Other presented by Cultural Center Belgrade (2017); Proposals for Surrender presented by McAM in Shanghai (2016/2017); and This exhibition Will Tell You Everything About FY Art Foundations in FY Art Foundation space in Shenzhen (2017). In 2013, Ciric initiated the seminar platform From a History of Exhibitions Towards a Future of Exhibition Making with focus on China and Southeast Asia. The assembly platform was hosted by St Paul St Gallery, AUT, New Zealand (2013), Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2018), Times Museum, Guangzhou (2019). The book with the same name was published by Sternberg Press in 2019 and was awarded best art publication in China in 2020. Her research on artists organized exhibitions in Shanghai was published in the book History in Making; Shanghai: 1979-2006 published by CFCCA; and Life and Deaths of Institutional Critique , co-edited by Nikita Yingqian Cai and published by Black Dog Publishing, among others. In 2018 she established the educational platform What Could/Should Curating Do? where different formats of instituting are tested and imagined through collective processes. Since 2023 WCSCD entered transition merging rural and urban taking over custodianship of the piece of land in rural Serbia. She was nominated for the ICI Independent Vision Curatorial Award (2012). Ciric initiated a long-term project reflecting on China’s Belt and Road Initiative titled As you go . . . the roads under your feet, towards a new future . She is undertaking practice based PhD in Curatorial Practice at Monash University, Melbourne. She is currently developing retrospective of Vietnamese artist Tran Luong that will open in Jameel Art Center, Dubai in 2024 and tour to AGWA(Perth), Govett Brewster Art Gallery (New Plymouth, NZ), Guang Zhou Fine Arts Academy Contemporary Art Museum among others. About Tosen's Garden The project is located in Taishan City, Guangdong Province, which is known as the hometown of overseas Chinese. This is an ancient historical village built a hundred years ago by overseas Chinese in Myanmar. There are woods behind the village and fish ponds in front of the village, which preserves good natural ecology. There are seven residential houses built by overseas Chinese in the village, all of which are well preserved. In the first phase of the project, a 400-square-meter historic property was restored. Visitors can stay in the historic house and experience the local life more than a hundred years ago. There is an organic vegetable garden and orchard which provide local specialties. About De Ying Foundation De Ying Foundation (DYF) is a charitable organisation that supports contemporary art in China and internationally. We believe that contemporary art has an essential place in today’s China, and are committed to widening access to the highest standards of arts programming. We take a patient, long-term approach that is collaborative and open-minded, supporting and learning from other organisations that share our aims and values, as well as launching our own initiatives when we feel there is a need. Arts education is especially important to us, since we believe both in its inherent value and in its potential for transformative impact. While our core focus as a foundation is on greater China, we also work with international partners whose work inspires us, and hope to engender and to be part of a genuine artistic dialogue between China and the rest of the world. De Ying Foundation has provided long-term sponsorship for the De Ying Associate Curator, Visual Arts, at M+. The foundation is Founding Patron of the Shanghai Centre of Photography and a key sponsor of the Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art at China Academy of Art. De Ying was a sponsor of the Beijing-based artist Cao Fei’s first major solo exhibition in China, “Staging the Era”, 2021, presented at UCCA, Beijing, as well as, the UCCA leg of “Who is He?”, the historical retrospective of Geng Jianyi, one of China’s pioneering conceptual artists in 2023. De Ying is the main supporter for Glen Ligon’s first UK solo exhibition “All Over the Place”, 2024, at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. In 2018, we were also particularly excited to be early supporters of Steve McQueen’s Year 3 Project at Tate Britain. De Ying Foundation also provided support in 2019 for the production of the catalogue accompanying Cecily Brown's acclaimed survey exhibition “Where, When, How Often and With Whom” at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. Village in Taishan, Guangdong Province of China.

Katelynn Dunn < Back Response to Latour I, Crisis, Production and Closed Communication Katelynn Dunn Divergent Mediums (Isolation and Closed Communication Channels),NYC. April 2020. ‘Culture detaches itself from the unity of the society of myth ‘when the power of unification disappears from the life of man and when opposites lose their living relation and interaction and acquire autonomy.’ [1] Isolation continues every day. It is hard to say when it unofficially started. During this time, people are focused on reflecting, taking it easy and self-care. People use the word ‘mundane’ quite often. Concerning production and the environment there is a positive overall from a global perspective, and that is what Bruno Latour discusses in the article, “What protective measures can you think of, so we don’t go back to the pre-crisis production model?” He says covid-19 is resocialising us in this moment while globalisation and capitalism wane, and we should use it to get ‘away from production as the overriding principle of our relationship to the world.’ [2] Within this experience, the world has been granted eyes to see that we have the ability to change and quickly. Production has halted throughout the globe due to the requirements of our governments. Movement has been blocked, borders closed everywhere, and we are all left to look to state leaders to make decisions about what to do after we slow the expanse of the new and mutating coronavirus. While we wait, we wonder what we should do without or what we could change to make the re-start for a new world a better place. Where are we going? More question and reflection – ‘What are some suspended activities that you would like to see not coming back? Describe why this activity seems to you to be noxious/superfluous/dangerous/incoherent and how its disappearance/putting on hold/substitution might render other activities that you prefer easier/more coherent.’ [3] I am not sure I have the insight to say what we can do without yet. Feeling so close to the pandemic currently and being within the gears of the machine moving it makes it difficult to fully understand the implications. It feels like being in an already moving and working world of its own. The ‘coronavirus system’ is our life now, and we only function within it. Its power has shifted our attention and moved our pieces. We are required to adapt to it, to work with it and to govern it. Feelings of monotony, lack of freedom, lack of control, confinement, these are the feelings and words that come to mind. It is not right. Leisure is fine. Heaviness is not. We are without so much at this moment that there are more paths to thinking of things that we do need, especially from a non-materialistic point of view. You feel the ebb of production in the environment, and it is not necessarily for the better. This is referring to the environment of ideas and its power, not of material production. It is important to be productive in our communication forming connection. It could be developed from having face to face or in person exchanges taking place. If this isn’t the case, it could be just as effective to have digital communication taking place, and then it is the activity between meeting that is most important for connection. One of the issues from this crisis is a decrease in the quality of communication, from a creative standpoint. Currently, we hear and see the same phrases repeated over and over due to absence of overall information available. We receive most information from media outlets as these are one of the main sources of communication while we are distanced from one another. It is mind-numbing and propagandist. We have more creative possibilities in a system with hyper connectivity and communication, because there are more channels to consciousness. Creating is situational. Art is situational. It is most captivating when it happens in orbit, cyclically, and sequentially. Each movement feeds on the one before, or the ones around it, and it continuously changes. It requires a setting for us to deem it relevant, and to stir us into questioning our existence or to take action. The artist forms the structure of their own creative atmosphere. In the current moment, this structure is changing via the virus, and we must find ways to maintain our agency to have control of our art and of our own future. This becomes more difficult in an environment with less information due to reduced overall movement, and most notably in an environment with a dramatically sensed drop in movement. Stopping or interfering with movement is completely averse to decision making power of all people. In our world, movement, or activity between people, is equivalent to power and provides force needed to progress. It also provides the agency to see by allowing for different positions in society and therefore perspectives. ‘If we’re so oppressed, it’s because our movement’s being restricted.’ [4] People may have more time to concentrate on skills of a craft. However, the authority of art will not be felt as strongly. How do we avoid becoming spectators, and blind ones, when movement is blocked? Hyper activity and communication in the globalized world is one that breeds significantly faster connections. This means there is more available information which creates more differentiated connections, language associations and diversity in the world. This leads to a deeply complex and unique evolution of rare ideas. This system proves creativity and is the artist’s world. While it leads to greater ‘pollution’ in the environment of ideas, which could be seen as a negative, the system with less communication and less information means less possibility (i.e. production) for people to contribute to building the world as they see it. It puts the power of thinking, idealizing, and constructing reality in the hands of those who have greater concentrated power, which will be fewer people. Social systems are flattened. This creates more equality and less conflict. However, it also decreases complexity between ideas and the overall need to question existence. To see the larger picture, and to have the ability to make a new system, one must have the connections to see, to have vision. With less production and activity, our vision is minimized, obstructed and reduced comparatively. For artists and critics, what I believe will be the difficult aspect of this problem we are attempting to solve and system we are attempting to restructure is the current notion attached to creativity. To create is to produce, so to be creative is to be productive. To move away from production means to move away from creativity or inventiveness. How will we value art in the new world if we detach creativity from capitalism? Could we have a system of creativity within a non-capitalistic society? Why shouldn’t we value complexity of ideas? What could be a new definition of creative? Will quality of art improve with less people producing? Where will the force to create originate in the future? Katelynn Dunn is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is based on understanding philosophies of experience and image, patterns in society and the human psyche, artist process, power structures and systems and language. [1] Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983), 180. [2] Bruno Latour, “What protective measures can you think of, so we don’t go back to the pre-crisis production model?,” AOC Media , March 29, 2020, https://aoc.media/opinion/2020/03/29/imaginer- les-gestes-barrieres-contre-le-retour-a-la-production-davant-crise/ . [3] Bruno Latour, “What protective measures can you think of, so we don’t go back to the pre-crisis production model?,” AOC Media , March 29, 2020, https://aoc.media/opinion/2020/03/29/imaginer- les-gestes-barrieres-contre-le-retour-a-la-production-davant-crise/ . [4] Gilles Deleuze, “Mediators,” in Negotiations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 121-134. Previous Next

< Back Shore Seeing Stillness 15 Dec 2021 Ash Moniz Jumping Ship For many companies its important to locate instances of loss. Which stages of a process or which assets are wasting time or money, can be crucial to identify. Preventing loss is one of the most strategic things that a company can do, and finding the weak spots in a system is necessary for this. Making visible wasted time/money is at the core of managerial processes of commodity circulation, and this is no coincidence considering the role that visualizing lost time played within the material history of representing motion in general. A process map, for example, is “a visual aid for picturing work processes . . . developed from the need to generate visibility of where time is used [so that …] the removal of wasted time from the business processes, could then be applied [1 ] ”. A member of Tylos company, was struggling with one of his assets for years now. After it was originally set up in 1999, it was doing ok for a while, but started to deteriorate as time went on. By the summer of 2017, this Tylos manager was facing severe financial difficulties, and it seemed like his business venture was going to fail. It got to the point where the cost of the repairs necessary to hold on to this asset would be greater than the cost of simply letting it go, which is a common phenomenon in this industry. Once an asset has been around longer than the time that it was originally built to last, then it becomes more expensive to actually maintain, and harder to acquire safety certification. The owner of the company could see that it was going to be way too costly to keep it up, so he decided to count his losses before it got any worse. In the summer of 2017 he decided to jump ship . From this point this asset was no longer owned by anyone, and therefore was no longer registered to operate. To “jump ship” is an English expression that means “to leave an organization because you think its going to fail or because you want to join a rival organization [2] . While the traditional historical meaning referred to an escape from forced captivity, over time the connotation has shifted towards the avoidance of failure (insinuating the desire for success), or in some [3 ] to “leave a difficult situation when you should stay and deal with it” (insinuating neglect for responsibility). Witnessing Stillness Here we have an image. There’s nothing in the image that visually denotes whether or not it was taken as a photograph, or if it is a still from a moving image. If it were a still frame then it would be an interruption of the flow of the moving image. A coming from and leading towards of time outside of the moment in front of us. It would be indexical to the time that it is not. If it were a photograph, it would encompass it’s own time, as it’s own enclosure (beginning and end) of duration. This stillness is indexical only to the “singular” moment that it aims to capture. The most probable signifier of still frame or photograph, is the aspect ratio of the image itself. As a general rule of thumb, it is common that moving image is shot in 16:9 and photographs in 4:3. While there is no signifier of motion in the background, in the foreground we can see motion in the postures of those swimming, the splash of water frozen in mid-air, and the recognizable shape of waves. What is the representational literacy required to read the temporal phenomenon that this image documents? According to film critic Mary Ann Doane [4 ] , if movement were “represented as the eye “really” sees it, it would be characterized by a certain illegibility, constituting itself as blur” Jumping Ship When Mohammed Aisha had to jump ship, he could only legally be on land for very short intervals of time (enough to charge phone, find drinking water, etc.) but then would have to return immediately, and remain on board. Due to Aisha involuntarily being designated as the “legal guardian” of the MV Aman in 2017, after Tylos Shipping and Maritime Services had abandoned ownership of it, Aisha was trapped on board all alone with no electricity or fuel, for four years. In March 2021, journalistic articles came out that spoke of Aisha’s situation (at the end of his fourth year stranded). But regardless of media attention, the only two options for his rescue were if someone volunteered to purchase the ship and become its owner, or if they volunteered to take Mohammed Aisha’s place as legal guardian. In April 2021, the International Transport Workers’ Federation found a representation of theirs to take his place. As such Aisha finally went home to Syria, after losing four years of his life in captivity. However, the ship still remains in place to this day, with an Egyptian volunteer now as its legal guardian. “He was abandoned for four years, and he is still waiting to get paid. We helped him with a lawyer to go to court and claim his wages. But is not enough to say oh this is absolutely criminal, this is absolutely unjust, this is not enough! Because there are people with obligations and responsibilities! Why didn’t the flag do anything, why didn’t the Egyptian maritime authorities do anything? This is where the focus should go!” [5 ] Standing from the shoreline, I am staring at an incarcerative stillness. But how can I witness the temporality of 4.5 years? Witnessing Stillness The imaging of stillness requires a posture of stillness. There’s a video on YouTube of a “Freeze Flash Mob”. It is one of those organized activities where a large group of people come together to freeze in place, mid-action, in the middle of a public area. In one still-frame, we can see a young girl posing in a still position, holding a camera in front of her face. However, if we unpause the image, we can see the she was not a part of the Freeze Mob, but that her stillness was simply to hold a stable position for the few seconds that it takes to take a photograph. (With a camera, one has to perform the stillness that they aim to document.) As we unpause we can see her camera phone flash, as if having taken a photograph to document the surprising historical event of stillness that she sees in front of her. After this flash, she resumed motion (defining her as a spectator, as a non-participant in the event.) The camera aims to capture the event in front of her, as a moment in time that actually happened. But with this photograph she will not have captured the stillness of the historical event that she aimed to. Because we can’t see stillness in a still image. It might be capturing the stillness produced by the photograph, but it is not actually capturing the stillness that of the event to be witnessed. The stillness that actually provides the magnitude of this historical moment. Even if we could see the other ships moving by (which I did standing on the shore taking this photo), we would have no literacy for the precise incarcerative stillness of the MV Aman. Stillness as Location in Time “In absence of the responsibilities of the owner, who is the first to be made responsible, is Bahrian, because this flag under the registration of Bahrain. But if Bahrain is slow, or doesn’t care or doesn’t don’t do what they should do, then we go and ask where the vessel is, thats why we went and knocked the door of Egyptian authorities, because the vessel is under sovereign waters of Egypt.” [6 ] I went to this exact location because where I lived was only an hour and a half away. My own physical proximity meant there was no reason that I wouldn’t have gone to see the ship. But what does proximity provide? No matter how close you get to the incident that is happening in front of you, you still can’t see anything. But what is the location of this violence? How do we locate a Syrian man, on board Bahraini flagged territory, with a Lebanese contractor, stuck in Egyptian waters? How do we locate responsibility, when the ship owner, the flag-state, the national waters, the recruitment agency, the nation of the abandoned, are all completely different. Even though this location is only a couple hundred metres from shore, it is unlocatable within records, as its no longer registered to its ownership. In general, while the shoreline is a defined locality, the visual particularities of an image from shore are quite similar anywhere in the world. The almost flag-like archetype of three horizontal stripes stacked on top of each other (sand, water, sky), exists romantically in the minds of most, even as an imaginary image. This reflects the illocatability of how spectators of the container are easily “mesmerized by its modularity, homogeneity and opacity.” [7 ] The locality of this beach can be defined as a position of spectatorship for viewing the site of incarcerative stillness, the MV Aman, along with many other arrested ships. It can also be defined, by being one of the only public (or non-private) beaches from the Suez Canal to Hurghada, or by being sandwiched between a military base and a highway. Witnessing Lost Time Here we can see the position of spectatorship from which a historical event was witnessed. We can see the viewpoint, the site from which the evidence of lost-time (the historical event of spectacular stillness) was witnessed by Mohammed Aisha. After having been on the ship for four years, one day he saw a massive backlog encroaching upon him, as the entire sea turned into a parking lot of immobile ships, from the entrance of the Suez Canal (a couple km away), all the way down the Red Sea. The stillness produced during these 6 days, became one of the biggest global moments in supply chain history. Only weeks later he was able to go home, thanks to the International Transport Workers Federation. Standing in front of the exact location where the Evergiven was stuck in the Suez Canal, villagers of Mansheyat El Ragoula pointed out to me where it was, and where it could be seen from. We stood on their doorstep practicing looking for something that was no longer there. When asking them how they felt about having taken part in such a global moment, they said that it meant absolutely nothing to them. All they cared about was how difficult it became to talk to people since then. Every time a journalist would come the village, the police would show up immediately. One person I spoke to was arrested for talking to a journalist. [8 ] The spectacle of this stillness brought global traffic to the small village, unlike any other point in its history. The place became temporally and spatially dominated by the schedules of journalists. I Interviewed a journalists’ driver [9 ] who worked during the 6 days of the Evergiven’s interruption, who spoke of the speed and urgency of driving to the hotels, to press conferences, and to find interviewees, etc. But the spectacle of this specific type of stillness, that of global supply-chain interruption, is connected to need, or demand. This stillness is indexical to lost time, to the motion that is not occurring. But what happens when the stillness is no longer a threat; no longer indexical to its potential continuation? Stillness that is not Lost Time Rather than through an increase in ship-engines’ speed capacities over the past decades, the primary site for the shipping industry’s increase in speed is the labour time at each port (the intervals of stillness). This acceleration was accomplished by decreasing workers’ access to shore leave and intensifying the workloads in shorter periods of time. It isn’t about making the motion of a trajectory faster; it’s about diminishing the loss between each trajectory [10 ] . Akinetopsia is an optical term that refers to the inability to see stillness. I have been thinking of this term while producing my archive of instances of supply chain interruptions in Egypt ( for example from strikes and work stoppages in Port Said and Sokhna.) The representation of work stoppages, interruptions, and inventorial losses in the supply chain has a history rooted in mechanisms of visuality and legibility in the quest to represent lost time. In the supply chain, we can easily interpret all non-motion as loss, or interruption. This is exemplified in the “Move Or Die” motto of the UPS-sponsored TV series Great Migrations, morbidly equating all supply-chain stillness to loss, or death. [11 ] But not all stillness in the supply chain is lost-time. Much of the supply-chain’s stillness is not indexical to the continuative motion that would otherwise be assumed. If a ship stops moving due to abandonment, such as the case of Mohammed Aisha, the time is no longer considered lost, because the ship is no longer needed, or demanded. While the case of the MV Aman was one of the worst in history, seafarer abandonment is one the rise. In fact, the Tylos Company alone had 3 other ships abandoned during the same year, with others stranded for up to 2 years. Storage in Motion Its important to see the how the incarcerative mechanics of both stillness and motion intersect through maritime labour, to extend the question of “stillness that is not lost time”, to think of how stillness is in fact produced in transit. Through the mass of interviews [12 ] that I conducted with workers on board a container ship, one of the main statements that came up across the different discussions, was that the ship is like a prison. Some had expressed that at least prisons were on land, within the borders of a nation, had an outdoor yard, and received visits/calls/etc, (which are all largely impossible at sea). The incarcerative attributes of this strict stillness are specifically due to the accelerative motion, because of the decreasing opportunities to ever leave the ship. Shore-leave serves as a “non- time” form of temporality that helps prevent the ship from being such an incarcerate space. If we think of how the stillness in motion and the stillness in stillness interact as different types of temporalities, much of this comes from how the ship as a technology of discipline on its own is a site that has incarcerative qualities. The fact that this stillness exists in motion is also not surprising, for the mere fact of physics. In physics we have concepts such as the Principle of Stationary Action, or Lagrangian. Mechanics, which are generally based around the way that when a constant motion of an object reaches an stable velocity, it appears as still when seen from an object travelling at the same velocity. It maintains a stationary position in motion. That stillness is a significant part of accelerative speed can also be seen within much of the development of what is known as “Just-In-Time” Logistics, which (in simplified terms) is largely based on the idea of compressing the time of storage into the time of transit. As such the idle time of storage-warehousing is then placed into idle time of ships in transit. The time of waiting to be needed sharing its emptiness with the time of waiting to arrive. I wonder if the incarcerative temporalities imposed on maritime-workers share some of the same stillness as the time of storage that was compressed into transit. The literacy of time (stillness/motion) is crucial to the representability of logistics: from the interruptive stillness of worker’s strikes and blockages, to the incarcerative stillness of seafarer abandonment and lack of shore-leave. For the Maritime Portal Residency, I conducted interviews and field work all along the coast from Port Said, to Ragoula, to Adabiya, to Sokhna (from Mediterranean to Red Sea). While the initial intention was to focus on the interviews as a performative practice, the political state in Egypt and the specific danger for researchers made it very difficult to do so (having researcher friends of mine in prison or held by the police during the time I was conducting this). After a few set-backs (being followed by the police on multiple occasions), I tried to think about how to work more with the materials that I had, rather than the materials I wanted. This project will be a film, that incorporates some of these interviews and the research, along with a weaving together of some of the topics that I wrote about here, but in film. I’m interested in how historical moments (of six days or four years), intersect between the different constitutions of time that shape logistical and historical temporalities. The project looks at the greater history of representing motion within the supply chain, in order to think through stillness not as lost time. [1] Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 126. [2] https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/jump-ship [3] https://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/jump-ship [4] Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 82. [5] An interview that I conducted (in August 2021), with Mohamed Arrechidi, the representative of the International Transportation Workers Federation who coordinated the relief effort to send Aisha home. [6] Same interview with Arrechidi from the ITF [7] Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (London: Zero Books, 2015), 347. [8] Interview with residents of Mansheyat El Regoula (4 different groups of people) in August 2021 [9] Interview with journalist’s driver in August 2021 [10] Akinestopia in the Management of Loss, Ash Moniz, MIT Press: Thresholds (2021) (49): 103– 108. [11] Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics, 262. [12] Interviews that I conducted with about 20 of the seafarers on board CMA CGM container ship in April 2019 Previous Next

< Back Seeing the Invisible: Documenting and Interpreting China’s Cultural Presence in Uzbekistan (Part 1) 25 Aug 2020 Alexey Ulko From the beginning, I saw the primary objective of my research was to document and interpret the different visual signs and symbols of China’s growing presence in Uzbekistan. I began writing notes and taking and collecting photos; trying to categorise and interpret the evidence with the help of different conceptual approaches, from visual anthropology to object-oriented ontology. The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing quarantine, however, have interfered with this intention in more ways than one. As I was thinking about how the Belt and Road Initiative has influenced Uzbekistan, the pandemic struck and very visibly changed the rules of the game. Beginning in Wuhan, it was a clear illustration of how China can affect the world – though I have serious reservations about calling this influence “Chinese”. The more I thought about the asymmetrical political and cultural relations between China and Uzbekistan, the more disjointed and fragmented the picture became. Not fragmented in a stylish postmodernist way, but rather, uselessly and helplessly mixed up and confused. I had set myself the task of researching “the politics and aesthetics of the visual representation of China-Uzbek relations, through documentary photography and film,” in order to provide anthropological perspectives on these. But typing those words on a keyboard made in China, sitting in an armchair produced in China, drinking tea from a china cup, and seeing the plastic letters HUAWEI on my modem connecting me to the world, made me question whether I could aspire to produce any meaningful research on something so intangible – the world or flow that is literally everywhere – and whether I could make any meaningful statement about China as a hyper-object , all while I remained within it. “The Chinese invented gunpowder, tea, silk production, the compass, paper, mechanical clocks…” – ah, thank you very much. This list of inventions probably isn’t as long as the one of all the objects around me which had been made in China, but it tells us an important story. If today’s narrative is that the Chinese are good at adapting and replicating something that has been invented (usually from the so-called “West”), it was obviously different in the past: things were invented in China and adapted for future use by others. Peter Greenaway’s mesmerising film, The Pillow Book (1996), tells the story of a Japanese born model living in Hong Kong. Her aunt tells her that when she is twenty-eight years old, the diary of a Japanese woman (Sei Shonagon), known as Pillow Book, will be a thousand years old, and that she (Nagiko) will be the same age as Sei Shonagon when she had written the book. The film made a profound impact on me and made me want to learn calligraphy (which I never really did). However in 969, exactly a thousand years before I was born, two generals serving the Song Dynasty invented a fire arrow which used gunpowder tubes as mini rocket engines, enabling them to fly much further, and cause damage to any inflammable object by setting them alight. This was the year rocket artillery was invented and utilized for the first time. Later, the Chinese produced the first cannons, but these would be vastly improved by the Europeans who would go on to use them many centuries later to subjugate China in the 19th century. These kinds of reverse loops seem to characterise much of what is going on between China, Central Asia and the West, and there is little in popular literature that can describe it better than the books on the Silks Roads by Peter Frankopan ( The Silk Roads , 2015 and The New Silk Roads , 2018). I will return to Frankopan’s texts later, but for now I would like to explore the issue from a very different angle. *** What are my earliest memories of China or anything Chinese? It could be a conical straw hat I played with in my early years (though that could also have been Vietnamese). The very delicate porcelain tea set which our family used only on special occasions. (We still have some of the cups, very Victorian by design, not bone china judging by its colour, but still very fine and translucent.) My father’s white shirt with a label I think saying “The Great Friendship”. The stories my father told me about the Chinese students he knew while studying at some in-service artist training course in Moscow in the 1960s. A painting by Qi Baishi similar to the one I had in my childhood Left: Remembering Qi Baishi and Tajik territories conceded to China Right: Qi Baishi’s seal and a letter to the Chinese government asking it to reconsider its actions against the Uyghurs by Marie van der Zyl, the President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews Beautiful facsimile prints of Qi Baishi’s watercolours. I remember Red Morning Glories and some similar pieces hanging in my little room as late as 1996. (Where have they all gone?) An exquisitely printed book on him by Evgeniya Zavadskaya ( Tsi Bai Shi , 1982). (Is that still with my sister?) I have just downloaded it in .pdf. Evgeniya Zavadskaya’s superb book on Qi Baishi In Uzbekistan, the growing Chinese presence had been relatively low-profile and pragmatic. It can be broadly categorised into being culturally and visually marked (e.g. the Confucius Institute, Chinese restaurants) or unmarked (Chinese investment projects). At the same time, there have been few, if any, noticeable cultural projects involving Chinese artists, curators, writers, musicians or photographers. The establishment of the Confucius Institute in Samarkand marked a shift from the earlier invisibility towards a more spectacular and confident Chinese cultural manifestation. The statue of Confucius and the belfry of St. Alexey’s Cathedral in Samarkand One of the main buildings of the Samarkand State University The statue of Confucius in front of the Samarkand State University that hosts the Confucius Institute As the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) seems to have regained momentum after its setback in 2018, I thought it would be interesting to follow the dynamics of China’s visual presence in Uzbekistan and reflect it through photographs, videos and texts. What is the BRI? How large is it? Like China, it can also be seen as a hyper-object that encompasses nearly half of the world’s population, a multitude of resources, and 50 percent of the global GDP. About 150 countries, including the Central Asian states, have reportedly joined the BRI in one way or another. Its infrastructure is accompanied by large-scale investments from Chinese companies and institutions (such as the Silk Road Foundation with funds of US$40 billion), and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), with funds of US$100 billion to provide development aid to the countries who participate in the BRI. The Chinese writer Zhenqing Zheng, claims that “more and more people see the BRI as an incremental China-driven project to develop international and regional public goods in terms of economic cooperation, free trade, infrastructural connectivity, international security and mutual trust. The BRI advocates the mutual docking of development strategies between participant countries and China. The aim is to build large-scale, high-level, deep-seated and high-standard international and regional economic networks.” If so, why is it then seen by many as a threat, rather than an opportunity? A snapshot of Chinese government’s influence One possible reason is the sheer might of the Chinese economy. Another reason is a deep distrust of Chinese intentions, which often borders on Sinophobia. As Sebastian Peyrouse claims, all Central Asian experts on China express concern about the silence cultivated by the authorities in their countries about their partnership with China. They worry that the true extent of China’s grip over the region has been concealed. They criticise the authorities’ incapacity to make decisions for the future of Central Asian nations, and are concerned about the atmosphere of suspicion, generated by the lack of information. About ten years ago I spoke to a driver and a junior officer working for a Chinese company with a large office located on the same floor as the educational centre I was visiting at the time. I asked them if they spoke any Chinese and they said no. “In fact, the Chinese do not encourage local employees to study Chinese, and do not recruit any local Chinese-speakers. We have an interpreter to translate any important negotiations, and the junior staff are learning Russian and Uzbek. All decisions are made only by the senior Chinese officials, and they do not want servants to understand what their masters are saying.” *** As a child, I liked Chinese fairy tales and often wondered why many of them featured young officials sitting exams, carrying documents and seals, performing various administrative functions. I liked stories about the huli jing (vixens), but my favourite was from Yao folklore, called Red Maize . Later, I read Journey to the West by Wu Cheg’en, and became most fascinated by the character Sha Wujing with his gourd and staff. Li Bai and Du Fu were my favourite poets at a certain point, especially the former. Li Bai was born in a Silk Road city known today as Ak-Beshim, some 30km from Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan. He started writing poetry before he was ten, was well-travelled, and skilled at riding, hunting, and fencing. From a pot of wine among the flowers I drank alone. There was no one with me – Till, raising my cup, I asked the bright moon To bring me my shadow and make us three. Alas, the moon was unable to drink And my shadow tagged me vacantly; But still for a while I had these friends To cheer me through the end of spring…. I sang. The moon encouraged me. I danced. My shadow tumbled after. As far as I knew, we were boon companions. And then I was drunk, and we lost one another. …Shall goodwill ever be secure? I watch the long road of the River of Stars. *** Christopher Francis Patten, the last British Governor of Hong Kong, was denounced by some Chinese media outlets as the “whore of the East,” a “serpent” and a “wrongdoer who would be condemned for a thousand generations”. *** There are several Chinese restaurants in Tashkent, and many more Korean ones which also often serve a generic East Asian mixture. I tried Chinese food for the first time in Islamabad in 1998 and found it very unusual. The gluey, homogenous, chicken soup; heavily fried vegetables; chicken pieces in a sticky sauce which resembled mixed caramel, but had a touch of spice – all of these tasted strange and artificial. But I liked chopsticks. I do not remember exactly where and how I learned to use them – probably much later when I started visiting Korean restaurants in Tashkent and elsewhere. In the early 1990s I often travelled to Karachi where I developed a taste for spicy food, which I have eaten ever since, transforming even the simple Uzbek plov into some kind of biryani. Uzbeks are, of course, famously conservative in their cuisine, and in many families they eat little else apart from their own traditional dishes – and their food isn’t as spicy when compared to Indian, Chinese or Korean cuisines. However, Chinese influence remains evident in dishes such as laghman (noodles), which has been borrowed from the Uyghurs. The Uyghur food can be found in Tashkent, but it is not as abundant as in places like Osh in Kyrgyzstan. In other words, in different parts of Central Asia, depending on the type of restaurants, you can get different local varieties of Chinese food (of which I can count at least three). The first is the outcome of the above-mentioned cultural transfer from the Chinese to the Uyghurs, to the Kyrgyz and Uzbeks. By and large, it is still determined by a geographical proximity to the Eastern Turkestan. The second type is more cultural. It’s the Chinese food you get at Korean restaurants usually run by local urban Koreans, who are descendants of the Korean communities deported to Central Asia from the Russian “Far East” in 1937. Unsurprisingly, the Korean restaurants that cater for the expats from South Korea are less exposed to Chinese influence, while those serving mostly local clientele, tend to be more relaxed and generic. Finally, there are distinct Chinese restaurants, usually run by the Chinese, with all the necessary attributes of Chinese restaurants scattered all over the world, though still rather rare in Uzbekistan. That being said, they seem to be more popular than Indian restaurants, which has always surprised me because of the apparently sufficient resemblance between Uzbek and Indian cuisines, which in theory would make the transition from one to the other smoother. While biryani does look like a simplified version of plov, Uzbeks have their own samosa, naan bread, and an indigenous version of raita called chalob. Still, despite the huge popularity of Indian films and other cultural parallels, Uzbeks have never really embraced curries. At this stage it is difficult to say whether Chinese food will spread all over Uzbekistan, but as two of its three local varieties are symbiotic, it makes Chinese dishes look much less foreign than the distinct South Asian cuisine. While the number of Chinese visitors to the country sky-rocketed in 2017-18, only the COVID-19 pandemic has so far hampered the growth of the number of Chinese restaurants, which were designed especially to meet demands from the tourist sector. *** What about US-China trade wars? What is going on and how does it affect Central Asia? So far, the impact of this has been rather difficult to assess. According to IFF China Report , 2020, a kind of provisional agreement between the USA and China was finally reached in January earlier this year. This included assent by China to move away from forced technology transfers and a willingness to offer foreign companies greater access to Chinese markets – plus a commitment to increase purchases of US manufacturing, energy and agricultural goods and services by US$200 billion over the next two years. Will China hold these promises? Simultaneously, the US cancelled its plans for the so-called “penalty tariffs” it had scheduled for $156 billion of Chinese goods, and cut the tariffs imposed in September 2019 on $120 billion of these goods from 15% to 7.5%. It also dropped its labelling of China as a “currency manipulator” as part of the deal. Will the deal hold? Will it force China to be more, or less aggressive? What turn will the events take if Trump is re-elected (or not re-elected)? All of these variables make the situation difficult to predict. Meanwhile, the huge letters of HUAWEI atop a block of flats above Oybek underground station nave been recently replaced with ZTE 5G . HUAWEI is a big name in the centre of Tashkent, one of those companies that have a marked presence in the city *** Another important name that indirectly links China with Central Asia is that of Julian Shchutsky, the first translator of the I Ching (“Book of Changes”) into Russian. His name first attracted my attention as an alleged member of themystical-anarchist group which included artists and many other Anthroposophists and esotericists. As a prominent Sinologist, he left an impressive imprint on Russian Oriental studies. Julian Shchutsky was a polyglot; he translated from about 16 languages. He was Professor of the Leningrad Institute of Oriental Studies, Professor of the Leningrad State University in 1936-37, and a research scientist in the Asian Museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1920-37. Shchutsky was given bibliographical responsibility for the Dauism and Alchemy portions of the Asian Museum’s new acquisitions. He also did extensive translations from late Tang poetry. Yulian Shchutsky’s newly found musical score at the exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art GARAGE in Moscow Shchutsky had various artistic talents but was modest about them. In his remarkable autobiography written in 1935, he says: “The greatest passion in my youth is music, especially Scriabin and later Bach. I was more interested in the theory of composition than performance. As a performer, I never achieved anything worthy of attention. Most of my music I wrote in the period of 1915 – 1923 – all of the pieces have been lost [1] . It is hardly possible to resume this work, since for this, it is necessary to live in music, and there is no time for that in my present life. […] Second in time and value in my life is of art and poetry. It began in 1918, but I do not treat my poems seriously. The only real result is mastering the poetic technique, which I use only as a translator. I was also engaged in painting, but I don’t have any real training in painting, except for lessons in the icon painting technique. I was also engaged in engraving on wood, but now I cannot continue these studies because of my poor eyesight. I participated in an exhibition at the Russian Museum in 1927. That’s all about my art.” In 1922 he met the poet Elisaveta Vasilieva (aka Cherubina de Gabriak) in St. Petersburg. On 3 March 1923 she wrote to her friend and fellow Anthroposophist, the poet Maximillian Voloshin: “Love came into my life, maybe I learnt how to give for the first time. He is much younger than me, and I want to save his life. He is both an Anthroposophist and a Sinologist. He holds music, poetry and painting in his hands.” In 1927, Vasilieva, who was an important figure in Russian Anthroposophical movement, was arrested and deported to Tashkent where she died on 5 December 1928. Before her death, Shchutsky visited her in Tashkent twice, on his way to Japan and back. On his first visit she wrote, inspired by him, 21 poems attributed to Li Xiang Zi, a fictional Chinese poet exiled for his “belief in the immortality of human spirit”. The name of Li Xiang, invented by Shchutsky, means “a philosopher from a house under a pear tree”, where Vasilieva indeed lived in Tashkent. It was also a phonetic play on Elisaveta’s first name. This literary mystification became her swan song. Shchutsky lived for another ten years full of professional achievements, as well as with fears of imminent repressions against him. He was arrested two months after defending his PhD dissertation on I-Ching in Pitkelevo, a village in the Leningrad province on 3 August 1937. He was charged with counter-revolutionary activities under articles 58-10 and 58-11 of the RSFSR Criminal Code, interrogated, tortured, trialled and finally shot on 18 February 1938. *** River… Here even rivers have green water, Like dense and lazy mica that has A shade of dust and wormwood … Ah, only in the North is the water blue … And here is the East. Between us, like a river, lies a desert, And tears are like sand. (Li Xiang Zi, Tashkent, 1927) Alexey Ulko , born in Samarkand (Uzbekistan) in 1969. [1] Some of his music scores have been found and displayed for the first time at the exhibition We Treasure our Lucid Dreams held in the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art GARAGE for which I conducted this research – AU Previous Next

Veronika Dashkova < Back Gigantic dwarfs of Lake Balkhash: Journey into a microscopic world of phytoplankton. Veronika Dashkova “Nature has created a wealth of wondrous forms whose beauty and diversity way exceed anything that has been created by man”. Ernst Haeckel What do you see standing on the lake, river or sea shore and looking attentively at the water surface in front of you? You will surely see the colour of the water, the moving or steel surface, reflection of the sky, trees, buildings and other objects. If the water is transparent enough, you might see some floating bugs, small fish in the water column and bottom with sand, stones, mud or even corals. However, there is much more that our human eye cannot catch, a tremendous underwater world full of tiny microscopic organisms called plankton. These planktonic organisms drift in the water column, following a current anywhere it brings them. Plankton populate almost all water bodies on the Earth, from small ponds and lakes to the oceans. Although they are invisible to a naked eye, they play a gigantic role in the functioning of a whole aquatic ecosystem. As all terrestrial plants, phytoplankton use sun energy to synthesize organic elements from inorganic through the process of photosynthesis, and produce about 50% of all oxygen on the Earth. It is believed that the activity of ancient phytoplankton Cyanobacteria resulted in the rise of oxygen in the atmosphere and oceans around 2,4 billions years ago, which facilitated the diversification of Life on our planet. Diatomea. Ernst Haeckel. Kunstformen der Natur (1904). http://www.silentplankton.com/Gallery/View/Haeckel But that is not all. Every cell of phytoplankton is uniquely shaped and coloured, forming an incredible diversity of beautiful forms. Mother Nature created astonishing artwork, that blows up the imagination and fascinates with the perfect geometry of a cell structure architecture. Likewise, a 19th century German biologist, Ernst Haeckel, was so fascinated by the beauty of these forms and inspired to publish graphical illustrations of plankton in a monograph Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature) in 1904. Images of phytoplankton from Lake Balkhash (10x magnification) Not an exception, Lake Balkhash is inhabited by hundreds forms (species) of phytoplankton. Covering the territory of 15,730 sq. kilometers, Lake Balkhash is one of the largest endorheic lakes in the world, enclosed inside the continent without a connection to the ocean. This feature makes the lake susceptible to climate change mediated or man-made impact. The strongest example of the fragility of endorheic lakes and the dependence on human activity is the current fate of the Aral Sea, a similar lake located in the arid region. You can think of it as a cyclic process: any substantial and long-standing change brought by the environment, whether it is natural or man-made, mediate changes in the aquatic trophic webs, which in turn will affect the quality of life of local human communities and the economy of a whole region. For example, phytoplankton are the base of an aquatic trophic web, responsible for primary production and serving as food for larger plankton and fish, fueling the energy up to the higher trophic levels. The availability, composition and quantity of phytoplankton will therefore affect the diversity and quantity of fish stock in the lake, which is important for us. Images of phytoplankton from Lake Balkhash (10x magnification) The unique symbiosis of freshwater and brackish water and availability of micro-niches in the lake creates a ground for co-existence of various phytoplankton communities. There are about 400 different species of phytoplankton found in Lake Balkhash spanning taxonomic groups from Bacillariophyta, Cryptophyta, Haptophyta, Dinoflagellata, Chlorophyta, Charophyta, Euglenida, Cyanobacteria and others. Each species has found a place in the lake with favourable conditions of water with appropriate range of salinity, pH, oxygen level, organic and inorganic substances. For example, phytoplankton community of freshwater sites in the western part of the lake is completely different from the community inhabiting brackish water in the eastern part. You may think of phytoplankton as a natural indicator of what is going on outside. Despite their small microscopic size they sense and reflect any changes ongoing in the surrounding environment by changing their cell shapes, colour, size and abundance. By identifying the composition of the phytoplankton community, we can judge about the state of the ecosystems and presence of disturbants. Some phytoplankton are even able to withstand thermal and heavy metal pollution associated with the activity of the metallurgic plant nearby the city of Balkhash.Hidden in the water column, these organisms have always been witnessing different changes the lake was experiencing and have always been interacting with them. Expedition to Lake Balkhash. June 2016. Veronika Dashkova is a professional ecologist, PhD candidate in ecology, Nazarbayev University, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan. Previous Next

< Back THE CULTURAL INTERWEAVING OF CHINA AND THE BALKANS: A TEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF ARTISTIC EXCHANGES UNDER THE BRI 3 Nov 2021 Marija Glavaš This text is the second in a series of close studies examining the cultural exchanges between China and the Balkan region under the BRI, taking art [events and exchanges] as its main focal point. In the first text , I focused on the ambitions and challenges of artistic exchanges in general, using contemporary Slovenia as an example of bad praxis. In this text, I will focus on Chinese art and provide a textual analysis of some artifacts and archives from the events and exhibitions previously mapped in my first contribution. As an anthropology student, I however lack the proper knowledge and tools to read these images adequately. Thus, I held an open-ended interview with colleagues Xu Tiantian and Ke Qiwen from Rockbund Art Museum and Nikita Yingqian Cai from Times Museum. Both of these museums are committed to presenting and researching contemporary art and they are partners of the As you go… inquiry. They have deep insight into the contemporary art context of China that I am learning about. Together we have read some of the images and they kindly shared their personal thoughts on these projects with me. I must note that these museums did not participate in any such projects under the BRI – most of the analyzed exchanges were happening through public Chinese institutions. As stated in the introductory text my main question was whether these exchanges live up to their potential of shifting away from classical national narratives and providing a common ground for different cultural identities. Before we dwell on the individual artifacts, events, and exchanges it is important to understand the context in which they are taking place. The BRI is mostly known for Chinese infrastructure investments in Asia, Africa, and (Central and Eastern) Europe. It is an initiative that is striving for both economic growth and economic connectivity amongst participating countries. These activities are usually in the spotlight raising both praise and condemnation. However, these investments are not the only activities under the BRI. Another important aspect of it are the artistic and cultural exchanges which are rarely discussed, praised or criticized. This may appear trivial at first as most people simply consider art as a form of entertainment and not much more beyond that. Art, however, when shared internationally, plays an important role in our perceptions of one another – it has the power to bring us closer together, realize our common points, and appreciate our differences. Considering the ever-rising xenophobia this is not negligible. On the example of China specifically, we are currently witnessing a concerning growth of hate towards the country and its people because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The novel coronavirus outbreak that could’ve happened anywhere played perfectly not just into many stereotypical narratives about the Chinese people, but also into political conspiracy theories brought up by cold war propaganda. These feelings of hate are not coincidental – they are the product of intentional alienation, lack of cultural worldliness, and apathy towards who we consider an Other. In this context, intercultural artistic exchanges can help bridge the divide and this is what the artistic exchanges under the BRI are ought to do. Namely, the aim of these exchanges is to form deeper bonds amongst participating countries and their citizens. As noted in my first contribution where I mapped cross-institutional artistic exchanges between China and Balkan countries, it is overtly stated in most exhibitions that their goal is to bring their cultures closer together through knowledge and understanding. However, they [artistic exchanges] often appear as a mere political masquerade with no real content to them, as the images presented don’t really represent contemporary Chinese identities. This opens up very important questions – do they live up to their supposed potential? Are they adding to positive societal change? Is there space for improvement? Below are my thoughts after conducting a workshop with a few colleagues from the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai and Times Museum in Guangzhou who shared their impressions with me. Due to limited visual material not all exhibitions could be used. The first thing one notices when looking at these exhibitions is that they are heavily centered around tradition. For instance, let us look at the Chinese Festival of Lights held in Belgrade in 2020. “Chinese Festival of Lights”, picture by Đorđe Tomić, 2020 These lantern festivals appear to be some of the most popular Chinese exhibitions all around the world. The lanterns are placed as theme parks and as such attract audiences that wouldn’t necessarily enter museums and galleries, giving them much more reach than your usual exhibition. The concept of lantern festivals reaches back to ancient China, and while the lanterns exhibited in Belgrade don’t resemble traditional Chinese lanterns, they portray very characteristic Chinese symbols. We see dragons, bamboo, hand fans, pandas etc. These festivals aren’t necessarily bad for one’s first encounter with Chinese art, especially since they are very inviting for broader audiences, but they don’t provide much more substance than what the average person would already think about when thinking about China. “Exhibiton of Contemporary Chinese Painting”, picture by Tanjung/Tanja Valić, 2019 Even when we look at the exhibitions of contemporary artists, such as the Ink Imagery exhibition held in Kuća Legata (Belgrade) in 2019, we see a lot of traditional influences. While some techniques, shapes, and perspectives presented in this exhibition aren’t traditional, the symbolism is. In the picture above we see a waterfall, the red sun, and a pine tree. In the picture below we can see cherry blossoms and other floral symbols. All of these symbols are very common in traditional Chinese ink painting. For foreigners whose eyes aren’t trained in Chinese art these could easily be understood as classical Chinese paintings and not paintings created by contemporary artists. “Exhibition of Contemporary Chinese Painting”, picture by Tanjung/Tanja Valić, 2019 Such images are usually exhibited in state-owned institutions following narrow and strict narratives. From religious motives to mythological creatures – these paintings present an image of China that is very one-sided and static. We see a lot of bird-and-flower paintings and mountain-and-water paintings. Ever repeating compositions. We don’t get to see any diversity, just strictly canonical images, which have, through repetition, lost all of its meanings. Foreigners who are only subjected to this type of art very easily fall into the trap of thinking that this is all there is to China. And this is common to most of the Chinese art in these exhibitions held in the Balkan region. It is important to note that in the Balkan region, knowledge of Chinese art is very limited. We don’t see much of it exhibited in our museums and galleries, we don’t watch Chinese movies on television, we don’t hear Chinese music on the radio and we don’t learn about it extensively in schools. These limits make it hard to look at the art we do encounter critically. We don’t question the images that we see, the stories they are telling, and the gaps present in them. “Enthusiasm for Ink Wash Painting”, picture by T. Saletović, 2019 “Enthusiasm for Ink Wash Painting”, picture by T. Saletović, 2019 Some of the exhibitions were also historical in nature, showcasing historical art and important artifacts. Such exhibitions naturally bring tradition and historic culture closer to their audiences and for building intercultural understanding and empathy this is just as important as getting to know the contemporary identities, ideas, and characteristics. Yet, it seems that these historical images remain the only accessible knowledge of China and the Chinese people. Lord Baopu explains how to stay away from heat, 1644-1911, ink on silk It appears that what is provided in these artistic exchanges is just one fixed image of China. An image that hasn’t changed in ages, that’s full of gaps and that’s suppressing diversity. As such it cannot adequately represent Chinese identities, especially to foreigners who often lack the knowledge to separate reality from a constructed image. As mentioned above, in the Balkan region most people are very distanced from Chinese culture.They only discuss China in the context of politics which only distorts their views more. Exhibiting these ancient, historical, mythological and religious symbols furthers this mystification instead of providing knowledge and consequently enabling understanding. As Xu Tiantian, Ke Qiwen, and Nikita Yingqian Cai noted there is a big disconnect in these exhibitions from what China really is. There is not just one China and one Chinese identity. Based on carefully selected and distinctly narrated historical images, this forced oneness perfectly resembles classical nationalistic narratives, just served on a nicely decorated plate. This disconnect between representation and reality makes it hard for these exchanges to bridge the divide between the Balkan and Chinese people since knowledge always stays limited and carefully directed. To truly grasp the essence of a different culture the free transmission of knowledge is of utmost importance. And not just knowledge on history – also knowledge on the day-to-day lives of the Chinese people. In conclusion – these exhibitions, although presented as bridges between nations, only further promote nationalistic narratives. These may not enter the realms of radical nationalism, however, they also don’t surpass national conservatism. While the exhibitions held under the BRI provide audiences with entertaining and educational art, they don’t appear to fulfill their purpose of bridging the divide they acknowledge. Marija Glavaš , student of Culturology at the Faculty of Social Sciences in Ljubljana Previous Next

< Back Astrobus Ethiopia 2021 | Omo Valley Southwest Ethiopia 11 May 2021 Forward Astrobus Ethiopia 2021 Omo Valley Southwest Ethiopia We invite you to join us on our journey of learning and unlearning that has already been underway for the past year with Astrobus-Ethiopia through the curatorial inquiry of As you go…roads under your feet, towards the new future. Astrobus was initially established in 2017 to reach students across Ethiopia with the aim to inspire, connect, and empower. In previous editions, scientists, astronomers, artists, writers, and filmmakers alike have hopped on the bus in Addis Ababa to embark on this journey of knowledge sharing. The previous year moving into 2021 has been unlike the years we have all personally experienced before. As Ethiopia continues to undergo an unceasing rise in covid cases (with a 1 in 4 infection rate), challenges have arisen regarding how to maintain distance with ones communities while still making a difference in localities who remain somewhat digitally estranged. How do we keep communities safe? How may we keep caring? How do those of us who are far from Ethiopia, with no connection to the knowledge of Astrobus, actively support, learn, and empower this kind of work, grounded in our interdependence in Ethiopia. How may we overcome physical separation but also transport this knowledge and care into our own immediate communities? In February earlier this year, the co-founders of Astrobus-Ethiopia, Yabebal Fantaye and Sinkneh Eshetu (who also make up one of the many partner cells of our project), conducted their first research trip to Omo Valley in Southwest Ethiopia to better understand the conditions under which this year’s Astrobus may happen. They visited several places with the aim to locally situate their intention – to not only understand local needs but to also explore the multitude of possibilities of what an encounter may be. More on the research trip can be read about here. In an interview with Yabebal Fantaye, she describes this year’s research trip: [The] ambition of Astrobus-Ethiopia is to reach students from all corners of Ethiopia through its series of events. In the past, the team has travelled to the north and the south of Ethiopia. This year, the team plans to travel to the Lower Omo valley, the south west of Ethiopia, which is known for its extraordinary cultural diversity; approximately 8 ethnic groups; and ecosystems including grasslands and pristine forests, and other natural wonders. Omotic-speakers are endemic to the south Omo and include the Ari, Maale, Daasanach, and the Hamar-Banna. The region is home to the vast omo park, and the massive Gibe III dam built on the Omo river. The full interview can be read here . From May 10th, the activation of Astrobus 2021 will begin and will continue for six days. We will find ways to follow their activities on daily basis and to share their experiences with you. After the project ends, we will continue to share the accumulated knowledge of Astrobus to our local communities, to actively learn from their mode of working. Saving you a seat on the bus, Biljana Ciric The team for Astrobus-Ethiopia 2021 includes: Science & Technology Team: Yabebal Fantaye, Sinkneh Eshetu, Redeat Asefa, Bezawit Tesfaye, Alemiye Mamo, Shambel Sahlu, and Eyerusalem Tamirat. Art & Innovation Team: Yeabtsega Getachew, Michael Abebaw Felleke, Efrata Birhanu, Kalkidan Taddesse, Betelhem Abebe, Lidiya Zelke, Robel Kiros, Tinsae Tsegahun, Yidnekachew Weldesilase (ይድነቃቸው ወልደስላሴ), and Abiy Hailu Astrobus 2021 has been supported through As you go..roads under your feet, towards the new future inquiry and CURTAIN with Rockbund Art Museum. The inquiry is composed of research cells including What Could Should Curating Do (Belgrade), Moderna Galerija (Ljubljana), Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai), Guangdong Times Museum (Guangzhou), ArtCom (Astana), Robel Temesgen and Sinkneh Eshetu (Addis Ababa), and The Public Library (Bor). The first stage of the project has been supported by the Foundation for Arts Initiatives, CURTAIN (Rockbund Art Museum), Austrian Cultural Forum, Curatorial Practice (Monash University Art, Design and Architecture), and the Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. Local partners of Astrobus 2021 include: Ethiopian Space Science & Technology Institute (ESSTI), Ethiopian Space Science Society (ESSS), the University of Arbaminch, and the University of Jinka. Previous Next

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Alumni Alumni 2019 Lecture Series Participant Activities Alumni is an independent curator, cultural activist, and founder of the creative communication platform Artcom. She was born in 1987 in Kazakhstan and continues to live and work in Astana. Kapar curates and organizes exhibitions, urban art interventions, discussions, lectures, and workshops. To accomplish such wide-ranging initiatives she often collaborates closely with art and educational institutions, as well as scientific apparatuses. In 2015, she founded the open online platform Artcom in conjunction with the local art community. The platform brings together different cultural figures to share experiences and discover channels for greater interaction within society in order to develop and promote contemporary art and culture. In 2017, Aigerim initiated the Art Collider informal school—when art meets science. Through this initiative artists and scientists jointly conduct research and present lectures and discussions related to current issues. The results of the school are presented through exhibitions, publications, and audio-visual materials. < Mentors Educational Program Menu >