Visual Culture in Central Asia I: Repetition and Reenactment

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Spanning a century from the late-19th century to the late Soviet period, this two-panel series examines visual cultures in Central Asia. Drawing from case studies that include amateur photography, modernist art, mobile agitation projects, and mass-produced textiles, it contextualizes artistic practices and material production within social, political, and industrial structures. This series seeks to challenge dominant narratives by highlighting the active role of Central Asian artists and audiences, and the complex, often contradictory forces shaping their engagement with visual culture. Part I focuses on repetition and reenactment. Repetition is a foundational principle in artistic and cultural production, shaping aesthetics, meaning-making, and historical narratives across time and space. It operates in multiple ways: communal rituals and traditional art-making that transmit cultural memory through embodiment and materiality, formal techniques of visual and performing arts (from patterns to rehearsals), ideological mechanisms and institutional memory. Repetition is never neutral, it structures memory, reinforces ideology, and enables transformation, playing a crucial role in how societies remember, perform, and reinvent their pasts and future visions. This panel explores how repetition functioned as both a tool of modernization and a site of negotiation across multiple temporal regimes.

Sub Unit

• Arts I: Visual Culture, Material Culture, Applied and Fine Arts

Chair

• Alexandra Dennett, Harvard U

Papers

• Routes of Reenactment: Propaganda, Cultural Production, and Experiential Geography on Trains Beyond the 1920s - Anel Rakhimzhanova, New York U

• Between Suzani and Matisse: Ural Tansykbayev in the 1930s - Aziza Izamova, Harvard U

• From Ruins to Reinvention: Three Exhibitions of Soviet Uzbek Painting in 1928, 1934, and 1937 - Natasha Klimenko, Freie U Berlin (Germany)

Discussant

• Christianna Bonin, American U of Sharjah (UAE)