Visual Culture in Central Asia II: Spectatorship and Consumption

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 II focuses on spectatorship and consumption in the Soviet context. Early Soviet visual culture constituted both seeing and being seen as fundamental to a new kind of subjectivity that was supposedly emerging under Soviet power — “ten years of revolution have brought about decisive transformations in the gaze,” as one 1927 review of a Tashkent exhibition put it — and spectatorship had high political stakes. We propose to reorient histories of Soviet culture in Central Asia by putting audiences at the centre and examining the production of visual literacies. Focusing on how people in Central Asia perceived and consumed visual culture, and how their perceptions and desires were imagined by Soviet Europeans, this panel explores how spectatorship structured new forms of belonging after 1917, not in the abstract but in particular material conditions and in relation to particular domains of cultural production.

Sub Unit

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

Chair

• Jessica Chen, Harvard U

Papers

• Photographic Reading Lessons: Club Environments in Soviet Uzbekistan - Alexandra Dennett, Harvard U

• Consumers as Spectators: Theorizing Textile Design for Central Asia and Broader 'East' in the Soviet 1920s - Katherine Kelly

• 'Eastern' Viewers and European Eyes: Early Soviet Propaganda and Theories of Spectatorship and Difference - Mollie Arbuthnot, Nazarbayev U (Kazakhstan)

Discussant

• Maria Mileeva, The Courtauld Inst of Art (UK)