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Reflections from the Field: Uyghur Creative Production Across Borders


Author: Sonya Imin

24 October 2024

 

The following is a brief reflection on two fieldwork trips that explored how the Uyghur diaspora engage with art and visual culture. I visited Almaty, Kazakhstan in September 2023, Tashkent, Uzbekistan in October 2023, and Istanbul, Turkey in July-August 2024. In all, I visited a film festival, an art exhibition, and a youth arts program. Individuals and collectives experienced a range of dynamics in each of these programs, with differing positionalities towards identity, heritage, religion, and politics. However, this is an early synopsis, as the Uyghur diaspora contains many contours that cannot be represented in a short blog post. This represents a first engagement with these groups and follow up fieldwork will include interviews with selected artists or additional field trips.


Field Trips


I traveled to Almaty to attend the Jana Cekara film festival. This event was organized by a group of Kazakhstani activists to showcase films that centered on human rights issues pertaining to the region of East Turkestan. However, just a few days prior to the start of the festival, the venue revoked their availability after a visit from the local authorities, presumably under pressure from the Chinese embassy. Without a physical space for the festival, the team promptly pivoted to showcase the three-day event through online platforms. This proved difficult as they only had few short days to organize the technical equipment, online platforms, and a physical location from which the team could broadcast. Additionally, sharing films online required a different set of permissions from a couple of the production companies. Hosting the festival online created limitations in other ways. As a group grounded in community-based activism, moving the festival online meant that conversations and roundtables with local audiences were not possible in the same way. However, an online platform allowed for audiences from a broader geography to participate, with viewers streaming in from nearly ten countries. This was the second inaugural festival, with the first being held in person in 2022. No festival is being planned for 2024. A couple of months afterwards, several of the organizers curated an in-person art exhibit which I was unfortunately unable to attend, so my reflections focus on the film festival portion of their programming.




(source: instagram @jana.cekara) The Jana Cekara poster at a local music and arts venue

(photo by Sonya Imin)



I also attended the Mediney Miras exhibition in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. This was a gathering of over 30 artists from across Central Asia, as well as a few artists based in Europe. It was held in the Tashkent House of Photography, a landmark exhibition space right off Amir Temur square. This was the first exhibit of its kind to gather and showcase artists of Uyghur heritage at an established modern art venue. The exhibit itself was planned and organized by key members of the Uyghur community with little institutional support in just a brief three to five months. Paintings and sculptures were collected and driven across the borders from neighboring Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, following the administrative procedures needed to transport art across international borders. The opening event featured visits from the U.S. ambassador, representatives of the Uyghur Academy based in Turkey, and local news stations. There was also a brief fashion show featuring a local Uyghur designer. The exhibit was crowded with eager audiences of a broad age range. One woman interviewed by the local Uyghur news station expressed how she felt transported back to weten, or homeland, a place she has not been able to visit in decades.



(source: instagram @qut_look)




Artist Sabidjan Babajanov speaking at the gallery (photo by Sonya Imin)



In Istanbul, I connected with the Tugum Tugum art project, a two-month art and heritage program initiated by Uyghur youth. It was hosted at the Pawlan Uyghur youth center which hosts workshops, language and literature courses, and other community events. The organizers of the art program had recently participated in the Uyghur Academy’s second annual youth conference where they joined language and literature classes, cultural events, and youth leadership training. Attendees of the workshop ranged from their late teens to mid-twenties, including both high school students and young working professionals. Many had little to no previous exposure to art, while others have been creating artistic work for some time. Many were interested in Uyghur artistic and aesthetic history, including Uyghur objects and material culture. Many of the work created by the students, either previously or during the course of the workshop, included representations of objects such as doppas, musical instruments, or qapaq gourds. Other scenes included images of elderly Uyghur men, women dancing, or the front of a Uyghur house surrounded by grape vines. Many of their works reflect their own childhood memories of the homeland as they seek to reinterpret and reengage with their culture from their new diasporic home.



(source: instagram @ttart.project)



Student artworks in the Pawlan Uyghur youth center

(photo by Sonya Imin)


Key Features

 

These three field trips showcase the diverse ways in which different Uyghur communities are using art to cope with experiences of disconnection and diasporic exile. Between the two visual art programs, there was a generational difference between the Central Asian artists and the Uyghur youth in Turkey. Whereas many of the Central Asian Uyghur artists migrated in the 1950s and 1960s, the Uyghur diaspora in Turkey arrived relatively recently. Many of the Uyghur youth came to Turkey between the ages of nine and fifteen, around 2012 to 2016, so they have their own memories of the homeland. The artists exhibiting in Tashkent, however, were either born in Central Asia or migrated as children around the 1960s. Some of the younger Uyghur artists were predominantly Russian speaking. The older generation of artists, some who were in their mid-80s, has been creating work for many decades. Some were self-taught, other received training in Soviet-era schools. By exhibiting in an established Tashkent art gallery, they positioned themselves in dialogue with other Central Asian contemporary artists. The Uyghur youth in Turkey, on the other hand, were not practicing artists. Some of the organizers and participants were studying fashion, design, or animation, but none had received formal fine arts training. Therefore, the focus was more on the role of art in cultural maintenance, connecting with identity and heritage, and what Uyghur visual culture looks like in diaspora.


A primary difference between the art-based programs and the film festival was the presence of political content and experience of censorship. The events surrounding the Jana Cekara film festival shows how China sees creative projects such as films as a political threat and is extending its censorship across national borders. While the program included artistic and fiction films, there were also a few documentaries that highlighted the harsh political environment and repression experienced in the region. The keynote guest included Uyghur activist Rushan Abbas who spoke to online audiences on the opening day. The organizers did not shy away from the political resonance of showing films pertaining to East Turkestan, and directly engaged the human rights crises and cultural erasure that is occurring in the region. By showcasing these films, they wanted to educate local audiences and invite conversations around these topics. This differed greatly from the art exhibit in Tashkent and the art workshop in Istanbul, which focused more on cultural heritage and representation. While artists acknowledged that creating Uyghur art has inherently political connotations, they wanted to showcase the beauty and heritage of Uyghur visual culture outside of the experiences of political expression. Explicitly political work was absent in both projects. Therefore, they also did not experience censorship or pressure from local authorities in either Tashkent or in Istanbul. 


Reflections


Based on this fieldwork and conversations with artists from diaspora groups in Turkey and Central Asia, Western representations were not a prevailing concern. Uyghur artists that I spoke to are less concerned with, or even aware of, how they are being represented in Western media. They do, however, contend with the ways China has tried to erase, flatten, and appropriate their culture. They spoke about how their art expressed elements of what it meant to be Uyghur, often signaled by memories of the homeland, re-imaginations of Uyghur visual culture, or even abstract expressions of personal sensations. The presence or absence of Uyghur material culture, such as musical instruments, textiles, or household objects, signaled differing strategies and attitudes in what visual symbols of Uyghur culture are important to hold on to under colonial erasure. Some artists hold a preservationist mindset, where they desire to document the visual history and memory of the homeland. Other artists take a personal expressionist approach, using art to liberate themselves from perceived stereotypes or self-exoticisms. Between these different approaches, the use and representation of material culture in their work can indicate a range of identity attitudes and decolonial strategies.


Culture and identity are shaped by the visual and the material, it orients us towards a lived and embodied experience. My early ethnographic research indicates that objects hold a strong symbolic value in Uyghur art and culture. Objects become visual markers of Uyghur identity, though its use varies across individual preference, socio-cultural attitudes, and aesthetic alignment. The presence or absence of certain objects, such as religious garments, musical instruments, or textiles, might gesture towards a deeper understanding of how Uyghur artists are conceptualizing their own identities in diaspora in the face of settler-colonial erasure. Objects that were once benign, such as a wooden spoon or a gourd, can act as vehicles of cultural signaling, memory making, and identity renegotiation. Other artists might feel limited by these objects and symbols and choose to articulate their resistance through a direct rejection of representative work, making art that reflects the abstraction of their inner individual being. Even so, they might integrate hints and gestures towards homeland aesthetics, such as the texture of a mud brick wall or the colours of the desert. Uyghur material culture might still be articulated, but in a deconstructed and abstracted sensibility. These choices around representation, articulation, and abstraction gesture towards a variety of attitudes towards what it means to express Uyghurness through visual art.



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