Untitled
2019, video performance, 1’ (designed to loop)

As one hypothesis, suggests that in order to move forward, visions of historical identification must be critically examined as the phantoms of consciousness they are. These figures, literally burdened by different headwear, are dressed in the color worn by woman exploring new universes and ghosts from another time or mind, their movements bound to one another in a counter-argument to the nomadic symbol of impossible autonomy. Both a figurative image and a literal image, whose very body is visually fragmented, becoming part of the landscape itself. [Shaarbek Amankul]

End of Nature
2010/2020, 3 channel video, 3’

Designed as a 3-channel video installation, this project reminds us of our dependence on nature – destroying it we destroy our habitat and thus destroy ourselves. Our sense of omnipotence is a myth; as humans, our well-being depends on the well-being of nature. The work is a manifesto calling for the preservation of biological and cultural diversity as a part of our identity. In a country riddled with Uranium mines, and a legacy of selling its natural resources to support foreign interests, the destruction on the screen can be seen as but a chilling preface to the devastation ahead. With original footage shot in 2010, however, this work was made after the Kyrgyz government ban on Uranium mining in 2019.

Duba
2006, 3’05″ (original 6’56″)

Shamans are healers who use traditional practices to cure people of ailments, triggering natural forces on a subconscious level to help overcome illness. On screen, there’s only a close-up of a face – the fascinating physiology of a trance – a shaman performing a ritual. The title of the work ‘Duba’ means ‘cleaning the soul’. In Kyrgyz culture scientific explanations can be ineffective since many people do not trust logic. The realm of informal medicine and inexplicable phenomena is often more convincing than science. This era of complex conditions of social upheaval and rapid changes within the fields of technology and communication lead to feelings of inadequacy and a loss of identity. People therefore turn to shamans to obtain treatment for their illnesses. The irrational is a form of restoration lost identity. [Shaarbek Amankul]

Circumcision
2011, 3’43″ (original 4’10″)

Documenting the traditional circumcision ceremony of the artist’s nephew, this work is another chapter in the portrait of his nation, which Shaarbek Amankul unblinkingly captures on film, from intimate familial moments to explicit scenes viscerally impossible to watch. During the modernization of Kyrgyzstan in Soviet times, the tradition of circumcision was banned, but was nevertheless performed in secret in often unsanitary conditions without appropriate medical instruments. Today this right of passage is performed in official institutions by countless families free to practice their cultural and religious traditions.

New Society
2006, 1’

The video New Society shows poor villagers on the outskirts of the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek, emptying aid packages of bottled water onto the arid ground so they can recycle the plastic for cash. The devastating irony by which the normally environmentally sound practice of recycling results in the wastage of water is a reflection upon the economic privation and shortsightedness wherein a population comes to prefer the quick cash from recycling to the water itself. This twisted take on the water economy is devoted to the search for social identity on the part of thousands of residents of the suburbs of Bishkek. This work looks at the population who left their villages after the collapse of the Soviet Union, only to remain marginalized to this day by the city infrastructure through unemployment and poverty.

We Need To Live
2007, 4’33″

Editing documentary footage within a poetic structure, Amankul’s videos have tracked the fundamental social, political and cultural changes that have taken place in Kyrgyzstan since it gained independence from the USSR in 1991. During this time there has been considerable civil unrest and a move from a secular to an Islamic state culture. The two-channel film examines, in brutal counterpoint, the tragic discrepancies between propaganda and reality, as well as the ludicrous faces of state power, inhumanity, wastage of resources and civil unrest.

Lenin Stands – Lenin Fell Down
2003, 1’30″

With the advent of Communism in Kyrgyzstan, pre-Soviet ways of life were transformed as nomads became fighters for an international revolution, farmers became citizens, and Muslims became atheists. In the central square of Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek, Lenin’s sculpture proudly stood from 1982 to 2003. In an almost comic case of cultural confusion, even after gaining their independence, masses of former communists came to pray beneath this statue; the worship of Communist ideology giving way to the mass prayers of Ramadan. Lenin towered above this square until 2003, when he was brought down from the facade of the Historical Museum (the Museum of Revolution until 1992), and moved to its backyard. This procedure, though oddly ceremonial, was not advertised by local authorities. This work captures a rare historic moment – Lenin in flight, suspended between a past of failed ideologies, and an uncertain future. The ceremony of the changing of the guard – so appropriate to this notable event – is ironically incidental to it, taking place every day at this location, and clearly oblivious to Lenin’s historic flight.

Transformation
2005, project documentation video, 12’14″

Transformation is a project curated by Shaarbek Amankul as part of his Nomadic Art initiatives, inviting international artists to examine the social and political issues of Central Asia: the movement from a totalitarian crisis of public and political life to open civil society. The project took place 2005 amidst the derelict buildings of a former secret soviet military base which produced uranium from the waters of Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan. Here the ruins of the architecture represent not merely potential ecological catastrophe, in their echoing of Chernobyl, but in the casting off of a place through the implacability of capitalism. This contradiction, the history and reason for the existence of the buildings opposed to the natural surroundings, embodies inspiration for investigations of topics such as spirituality, globalization, international terrorism, and dictatorship. [Shaarbek Amankul]