Kazakhstan’s newly opened Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture offers a guide to decolonization, and it goes something like this: Remember, rethink, advance, dance. These steps were put into practice in September, when a collective of Kazakh visual artists, musicians, poets, and singers, adorned in feathers and sumptuous fabrics, gathered in the center’s cavernous forum to summon the Aral Sea. The once-vast saline lake was systematically drained in the latter half of the 20th century, when the region was colonized by the Soviet Union. Today, it is a salty depression in the heart of Central Asia. “As descendants of the people who first witnessed the signs of the sea’s disappearance, we, contemporary Central Asians, have to deal with what is left in the wake of this catastrophe,” reads an artist statement from Diana T. Kudaibergen, a cultural and political sociologist, and a member of the creative advisory board that serves Tselinny in place of a head curator. The performance, titled Barsakelmes, took its name from an island, once the largest in the Aral Sea, which grew rumors of a temporal vortex amid the Soviet irrigation project. The title translates from the Kazakh language to “If one goes there, one won’t return.”Perhaps that’s why Barsakelmes opened programming. From its history to artistic strategy, to the building it now occupies, the Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture embodies the inverse message: Learn and live. Barsakelmes reinterpreted the legend of Nurtole, a Central Plains hero who tamed a terror of snakes and dragons with his sacred kobyz, an ancient Turkic bowed string instrument. The legend ends with Nurtole chaining evil beneath the water of an unnamed sea; his lullaby becomes eternal ocean noise. Barsakelmes asks: What if those mystic waters were the Aral? In the performance, the beasts, having been starved of song and mutated by the nuclear tests conducted by Soviets in the region, reemerged as a sociopolitical monster of a problem. Folk songs alone can’t soothe a modern state, so the participants brought a synthesizer. BARSAKELMES performance, September 6-7 2025, Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture, Almaty.Photo: Nurtas SisekenovThe audience was a mix of local and international arts patrons, professionals, and journalists, seated in a half-circle around a monumental multi-colored yurt by Berlin-based Kazakh visual artist Gulnur Mukazhanova, with additional visuals by Darya Temirkhan. The installation was like the Barsakelmes of legend: a manmade portal to the spiritual plane. Whirling dancers wrapped in white linen passed in and out, drawn by salt lines on the floor. A traditional throat singer sang of families torn apart, according to an attendee fluent in the language. Late into its 90-minute running time, horses charged in—or maybe that was the sound of drums.It’s difficult in 2025 to anticipate a somatic purge of such power unfolding in a major Western museum, or at least those that operate comfortably under capitalism. I think that’s partly because decolonization requires a public memory—what happened to whom, and what all that meant—that is honest and therefore worth fighting for. Barsakelmes was a call to refuse comfort from systems designed to decimate the spirit. It urged its viewers to examine the most painful parts of history, to choose a path that foregrounds Indigeneity. Grieve loss, rather than intellectualize it. Accept that the Aral Sea is gone, but find that within the shallow pools reforming in its basin, fish still swim. Kazakhstan gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. (Uzbekistan, which opened its first international biennial in September, was liberated that same year.) That’s 30-odd years to begin to come to terms with the traumatic recontextualization of Central Asian history—including its visual and performing arts tradition. The first generation of Kazakh contemporary artists to emerge post-USSR inherited an epochal to-do list: Break from propagandistic aesthetics, reestablish a Kazakh artistic language, re-forge connections between Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. Here enters the Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture. It was founded in 2018 by the Kazakh businessman and entrepreneur Kairat Boranbayev as the nation’s first private cultural institution and until now operated under the name Tselinny Temporary. The new Tselinny is a “horizontal institution,” according to it director, Jamilya Nurkaliyeva. It has no plans to ever appoint a head curator or amass a collection, in contrast to the Almaty Museum of Arts (AMA), a private museum from collector Nurlan Smagulov that opened this past September and acted as another high-profile addition to Eurasia’s contemporary art landscape.Tselinny Center, 2025. Copyright Laurian Ghinitoiu and Asif Khan Studio. “In my opinion, it is obvious today’s leading institutions are no longer concerned with collecting and establishing hierarchies of genres but are looking to create new stories in an open, lively dialogue with the community, primarily the local one, where they can learn, create, and observe,” Nurkaliyeva said. Tselinny Temporary’s program was similarly anti-hierarchal, focusing on personal experiences of societal upheaval rather than rushing to brand a new movement. The 2021 survey “Here, There, Nowhere,” for example, gathered multigenerational, multidisciplinary artists united by an irreverent thread. Each participating artist explored aspects of life in Central Asia on the cusp of independence, and in its aftermath, from shifting ideas of feminism to the influx of mass-produced goods. Among the presentation was Almagul Menlibayeva, a famous contemporary Kazhak artist who trained in the Soviet realist style but turned in the early new millennium to performance and video. A video recording of her 2002 action Vechnaya nevesta (Eternal Bride) is playing at the AMA. For it, she roamed the sidewalks and bazaars of Almaty dressed in a long white dress and veil, searching for the emancipatory modernity that was promised to her.To that end, Tselinny’s new home is an artifact: the Soviet-era former Tselinny cinema building, which underwent a seismic renovation under the leadership of British architect Asif Khan, alongside the Kazakh architect Zaure Aitayeva, Khan’s wife and creative partner. The cinema building was opened in 1964 in honor of the 10th anniversary of the transformation of steppe land, mostly in northern Kazakhstan, for grain cultivation. That was accomplished by diverting the two major rivers that discharged into the Aral Sea and were its vital sources of inflowing water. Tselinny from the Russian tselina, means “uncultivated, virgin land.” A park, bazaar, and Russian Orthodox Church, established in the Tsarist era, form the golden quarter. This is the ideological heart of Almaty. Locals went on first dates at the cinema; later, when the space was taken private, its owners turned it into a multi-function space that included a nightclub. Treasured above all were the sgraffito decorations created by the Soviet graphic illustrator and artist Yevgeniy Sidorkin for the main wall of its atrium. For Tselinny, Sidorkin evoked Kazakh mythologies: women dancing to the sounds of a dombrya (another traditional stringed instrument), men in Kazakh dress riding horses, and the illustrious apple trees which gave Almaty its name. The original facade was a glass screen, so that at night, radiant cinema light spilled through the atrium and brought the sgraffito to life. A succession of owners and renovations saw the cinema shuttered, and the sgraffito replaced with a replica, then utterly obscured by the time Khan arrived in 2017. Khan calls the building a “palimpsest” whose plaster layers reveal 50-years’ worth of shifting ideological, religious, and artistic sentiment in Almaty—literally, since the layers have been pulled back to reveal the original sgraffito behind drywall. The building has been restored and joined by new designs that recall the wealth of petroglyphs found throughout Central Asia. The center’s inaugural program included an exhibition on the regeneration of Tselinny titled “From Sky to Earth.” A large table in the foyer of the building was filled with documents and objects drawn from Khan and his team’s research, which involved a literal road trip through sacred steppe land: photographs, conceptual sketches, ancient-looking stones.There are no steps into the building; the entrance meets the city as a continuous plane. A row of white, staggering columns are the only overt division between Almaty and the front door. According to Khan, the totality of the facade should evoke the steppe, or at least one moment on it, as witnessed by the Tselinny team: A cloud, unleashing a torrential rainfall over the great grass plains. Blued and blurred by atmospheric distance—looked a bit like a bridge, he said.