The paradigm shift in the modern Central Asian art Discussing the recent developments in post-colonial and post-Soviet art (which he sees as one of the three currents in contemporary art), Terry Smith has characterised the current in the following words: ‘… a national culture was undergoing transition from one state to another, usually into a situation where different models of possible modernities were in open competition, and soon became suspended in antinomic contemporaneity with each other. … It is a paradigm shift in slow motion that matches the changing world geopolitical and economic order as it increases in complexity: the entire constellation is post-colonial.’ (Smith T. 2011, 183) In this article I argue that the paradigm shift in the modern Central Asian art, which can qualify both for post-colonial and post-Soviet discourse, indeed presents a complex and even controversial picture, which is somewhat different to the optimistic neo-positivist vision of all- embracing contemporaneity implied by Smith. The end of the first decade of the 21st century, marked by a worldwide economic and political crisis, signalled the end of an era of many hopes in Central Asia. The major economic and cultural breakthrough to the world arena that had been expected twenty years before, by and large failed. The region is more than ever before, burdened with corruption, autocracy, nationalism and traditionalism, ethnic, class and demographic tensions (Leshchinskiy 2007). As the first post-Soviet generation is coming of age, the culture, art and the individual artists in the region come under various kinds of pressure to which they respond in a number of ways. In this paper I seek to demonstrate how these extrinsic forces, often based on different visions of Central Asia, provoke a range of cultural and artistic responses. I examine these interactions combining some internationally recognised narratives with my own experience as an artist and culturologist living and working in Uzbekistan and I fully acknowledge that the situation in other Central Asian countries is different. Aware of the temptations and dangers of sweeping statements and over-generalisations, I nevertheless opted to focus not only on country-specific but on region-specific issues related to the recent developments in the modern art in Central Asia. To avoid confusion, I use the terms ‘modern’ in the meaning ‘as of the early 21st century’ without any connotations and ‘contemporary’ to denote a certain type of art particular to this period. In terms of extrinsic forces I can see three large groups of influences that shape the current cultural and artistic environment in Central Asia, namely: a) the lingering Soviet legacy; b) the ethnic and traditional heritage; c) the demands of the modern globalised world. Gamal Bokonbaev, a well-established art critic from Kyrgyzstan, suggests a similar classification (Bokonbaev 2006, 4). Governments, public opinion, material needs, geographic and cultural peculiarities of the countries, international bodies and organisations apply these kinds of pressure in various combinations. It can be argued that most local authorities in the region combine the Soviet and traditionalist approaches and pay only lip service to the contemporary international context. On the other hand, international non-governmental organisations (for example, UNESCO, Soros Foundation, Goethe Institute and so on) pursue their own global agendas (Seiple 2005, 258) rooted in the Cold war-era interpretation of the USSR and its heritage as that of ‘the prison of nations’ and not an ‘affirmative action empire’ (Martin, 2000). 1 What is common to all these extremely diverse influences is their normative character. These institutions and agencies come up with agendas attempting to prescribe what ‘true’ Central Asian culture should be, often ignoring fieldwork and the analysis of what it really is. Such approaches only reinforce a range of cultural stereotypes. These, often incompatible visions of Central Asia, projected by different groups, organisations and schools of thought arbitrary separate ‘authentic’ cultural components from ‘inauthentic’, ‘progressive’ from ‘regressive’, or ‘culturally beneficial’ from ‘culturally harmful’ and effectively block the perception of the real, vibrant and complex Central Asian cultural fibre. This is not to say that the complexity of the regional culture is not sufficiently recognised or researched; on the contrary, ‘diversity’, intercultural dialogue’, ‘cross-roads of culture’ and other similar concepts are regularly discussed and mentioned at various international forums (for example, UNESCO’s The Silk Roads Project1) but often in very general, abstract and yet normative terms. Organisations such as UNESCO, Goethe Institute and the British Council often join forces with various government agencies and hold forums stating that ‘today, people need to re-think processes and effects of the cultural diversity, imagine a future, and organize desires’ (Onghena 2007, 261). At the same time they admit that they have a limited capacity to prevent the rebuilding or destruction of important cultural monuments in the region2. I examine the role of NGOs below and discuss the links between prescriptive approaches to cultural development and the issues of power, proximity to power and class struggle. Artists’ responses to these kinds of pressure can be divided into two wide categories: compliance and resistance, or conformity and opposition. These simple and straightforward reactions to the extrinsic pressures are deeply linked to the internal motives of every artist – that is, the search of self identity and of public recognition. In an ideal case scenario, a successful search for the artistic self is rewarded with an appropriate public recognition. In an open art market the realisation of this principle is, of course, made more complex by a wide range of different factors. In the Central Asian context the power of the extrinsic factors almost reverses the equation. Here, and particularly in more autocratic countries, only compliance with one or another prescriptive cultural model (be it governmental, traditionalistic or multicultural) gives a chance of recognition (mostly by the stakeholders in this model), while the search for self identity (individual or collective) often implies the refusal to conform to these models, an opposition to the cultural benchmarks imposed from the outside. This paradoxical state of affairs and its underlying causes have to be discussed in more detail. In most states of Central Asia (the only apparent exception being Kyrgyzstan) not only does the government holds the monopoly of power, but it also aspires to control and guide the spiritual life of its subjects, to decide what art is appropriate and what is not for the ideology of the state. A telling example of how far the government can go in pursuit of this kind of control is the recent trial of Umida Akhmedova, a well-known photographer, who was found guilty of libel and defamation against the Uzbek people for an album of documentary photos showing different ‘national traditions’ in a ‘disrespectful and mocking manner’ (Aspden 2010). This inhumane approach is often ridiculed in the West, where it was often seen as nothing more than a leftover of the Soviet legacy, a shadow of Communism (Pop-Eleches and Tucker 2010). Having lived in Central Asia all my life, I have always wondered at two things: first, the extent and the depth of integration between the traditionalist and Soviet thinking which so many in Central Asia take for granted and second, that this cultural commonality has been often ignored 1 CLT/CPD/DIA/2008/PI/68 2 WHC-08/32.COM/7B as of 19 May 2008, <https://whc.unesco.org/document/10063> 2 even by such prominent sovietologists as Daniel Pipes (Pipes 1983). In my opinion, the Soviet legacy is not confined to the passing influence on the centuries-long local culture but has been a formative element in the development of the new national cultures in the region. Let us examine one of the examples of the official art from Turkmenistan, the statue of the Turkmenbashi in his native village Kipchak. The cult of the Turkmenbasi, his writings and the whole artistic style related to his rule are too often dismissed as pompous, absurd and artificial, which they definitely are; and yet the whole phenomenon of the official Turkmen culture of the last 20 years is also an almost pure, uninhibited realisation of a post-colonial ‘Central Asian dream’. The Turkmenbashi is shown surrounded by different symbols: he is wearing a tie and a jacket with padded shoulders, like a typical Soviet official; a baldric with the emblems of five Turkmen tribes over the shoulder and a toga. He holds a book (the Ruhnama) over the grotesque, theatrical Ionic capital. If this strange collection of heterogeneous symbols is to project any message, it would have nothing to do with the Turkmen historic past or its traditional cultural context. The vague and excessive imperial regalia (with Roman undertones) are superimposed on the body of a Soviet bureaucrat and as such, the statue reflects some static utopian concept of ‘greatness’ and contains no reference to any particular ethnography or history. What is remarkable is that although the Turkmenbashi’s politics could be regarded as explicitly nationalistic, there is nothing in this statue to support it. What we see here is a typical, a bit overblown, example of the Socialist art. Boris Groys wrote about the links between the Russian avant-garde and the Stalinist art (Groys 1992); here we see the same transition from the romanticised nationalistic feelings into the realm of the Myth with no temporal, historic, cultural or any realistic references. I would like to argue that this ex-temporaneity, the refusal to embrace the ever changing contemporaneity of the global world is characteristic both of the Soviet as well as traditional Central Asian world outlook. Let us look at the deep and meaningful links between the Soviet Socialist art and the Central Asian Socialist art of today in more detail. First of all, it is the assertion of one ‘true’ artistic doctrine, one paradigm which would determine what is acceptable and what is not in the art of contemporary Central Asian states. Even more progressive art forums such as the colloquium Arts of Uzbekistan at the Present Stage of Socio-cultural Development supported by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and held in Tashkent in 2005, paying lip service to multiculturalism, explicitly proclaim ‘the search of the national identity’ as its objective. The new ideology underpinning the new national art is found in traditions expressed by modern means: ‘traditions can survive only on the condition of continual development and openness to the new things, while contemporaneity must have firm links to its historic roots.’ (Turgunova 2005, 6) This negation of plurality, so characteristic of the Soviet thinking, has some important parallels in Central Asian cultures, which I earlier described (following Trompenaars’ model) as ‘diffuse, externally controlled and status-ascribing… with a strong sense of “right” and “wrong”’ (Ulko 2000, 4.1). Paradoxically, when diversity is acknowledged, it is often linked to the concept of distinctive nationalities and ethnicities which invites comparisons to the philosophy of the apartheid rather than post-modernity. The joint UNECSO and IFESCO project Arts Education in the CIS Countries: Building Capacity for the 21st Century supported the publication of a research paper titled Art Education in the Republic of Kazakhstan: Perception of the National Traditions and the Rapprochement of the Cultures which endorsed the officially adopted concept of ‘ethno- cultural education’ in Kazakhstan: 3  ‘The key reform principles of art education in Kazakhstan are the following: institutional development and strengthening of ethnic fundamental values at schools and education entities; promotion of ethnically native language and culture for each citizen; … continuity of educational activities aimed to ethno- cultural needs of a person and society; adoption of the local programs of ethno-cultural education tailored in accordance to ethnic and confessional specificity.’ (Muzafarov 2010, 18) At best, diversity is treated as another top-down ideological dogma to be strictly adhered to. If the need for a singular true art is common for the Soviet and the Central Asian cultural paradigm, then the Socialist concept of art as a reflection of social processes has been only partly adopted by most artists and art critics of the region. Socialist Realism was officially recognised as the singular creative method, scientifically reflecting the reality, its contents being the construction of Socialism in the context of class struggle in 1932-1934. The problem is, as we know all too well, that ‘socialist realism’ was never a documental or realistic reflection of true social events or processes, but rather a static glorification of certain Soviet myths, sentiments and ‘achievements’. The same tendency is even more evident in the modern Central Asian art which has dealt with the processes but continues to position itself as rooted in century-long national traditions. Museums and galleries are filled with highly stylised paintings with mandatory elements of traditional décor, often depicting scenes from the idyllic rural life. (for example, such Uzbek painters as Sabir Rakhmetov, Zaynuddin Mirzayev, Akmal Nur, Asliddin Isaev and many others). The problem is that although all Central Asian regimes made explicit statements about the need to restore the link with the past traditions, modern Central Asian cultures usually lack historic perspective and the very the sense of historic experience. According to the Turkmen art historian Ruslan Muradov, ‘the source of this Weltanschauung could be found in the medieval eschatology, in the religious understanding of the world’s development, from the creation of the man to the end of the world which in itself rules out the concept of historicism, of the evolutionary social development, characteristic of atheism.’ (Muradov 2010-2011, 55) This is, of course, typical of all ethnicity-oriented social models, not only Islamic. According to Anthony D. Smith, one of their key elements is ‘the orientation to the past: to the origins and ancestors of the community and to its historical formation, including its ‘golden ages,’ the periods of its political, artistic, or spiritual greatness.’ (Smith A. 1996, 6) What is interesting in our context is that in line with the Soviet doctrine of ‘social economic formations’, the modern Central Asian regimes present themselves as a new ‘epoch’, a new ‘golden age’ of the national revival, to which a complex, controversial and multidimensional historic development is irrelevant. The historic perception of causes and effects, the past and the present is replaced in the collective consciousness by a static, timeless and vague notion of ‘national traditions’, the notion which is less than a hundred years old. The anti-Soviet rhetoric of the current regimes has never significantly affected this, fundamentally Socialist approach to history and art. In fact, many examples of modern monumental art in Central Asia show remarkable similarity to the once famous panoramic paintings by Ilya Glazunov, a notorious Russian nationalist and elitist, who made several 4 attempts to summarise certain historic periods on one painting (compare Glazunov’s The Mystery of the 20th century and Nuriddin Narziev’s My Land). The gathering of different unrelated characters and images in one space, typical of such works, also characterise the abundant social advertisement, or propaganda posters which can be found across the whole region. These, usually photographic collages may feature a president, a few historic and modern buildings and monuments to the heroes of the past, happy schoolchildren with computers and a lavishly green poppy field with snowy peaks in the background. A particularly remarkable attribute of such posters is not only their disregard of historic, logical or aesthetic coherence, but also the lack of any explicit statement or message, so important in social propaganda. All these posters seem to project is the broad ascertaining of all-inclusive and abstract well-being of a nation. Another important commonality between the Soviet and the Central Asian Socialist art probably owes more to the influence of Russian philosophy rather than Marxism, and it is the predominantly cultural perspective on the work of an artist. Alexander Pyatigorsky, a Russian- British philosopher, wrote: ‘In Russia we are facing the dictatorship of culture… which makes individual thinking and any conscious activity de-individualised… When thinking has not formed yet but it already wants to project itself into culture… Every cultured person carries out this tendency, which I would call the loss of reason in a culture.’ (Pyatigorsky 1990, 94-95) Pyatigorsky’s description of philosophy can be easily applied to art. I would argue that in Russia and other post-Soviet countries culture has been seen as a universal key to and at the same an overarching paradigm for all forms of human activity, including science, religion, psychology, fine arts, philosophy, music and so on. In Central Asia this ‘dictatorship’ is particularly intense. Individual artistic efforts, driven primarily by the search for self identity, are viewed first of all in the context of a national culture. Masut Fatkulin, the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the International Confederation of the Artists' Union, said: ‘Having attained independence, the Republic of Uzbekistan got new impetus for the development of artistic culture… Big attention is given to the origins, and by referring to traditions, artist find their identity, come to realize their place in the global artistic process, search for their own path…’ (Fatkulin 2007) Here we have all the ingredients of the modern Central Asian artistic context: the political regime that guides the development of artistic culture and the impersonal ‘attention’ and ‘reference’ to ‘the origins’ and ‘traditions’ as the only fruitful (or possible) environment for artists to discover their identity. It is easy to see that this obsession with the national culture is in itself one of the factors strengthening culture administration in the region and thereby disallowing critical discrimination. This, indeed, is a far cry from the upbeat post-colonial sentiment of such authors as Terry Smith, Marsha Meskimmon and Okwui Enwezor. As Stephen Eisenman points out, ‘the culture concept and its cousin, cultural relativism, are positive obstacles for the creation of a new, cosmopolitan and critical World History of Art.’ (Eisenman 2011, 284) I would like to explore the parallels between the mainstream Soviet and Central Asian arts a step further. Let us go back to the above definition of the contents of Socialist art: ‘the reflection of the reality, its contents being the construction of Socialism in the context of class 5 struggle’. If we could identify some deep links between the Soviet and the modern mainstream Central Asian art, what kind of class struggle can this definition point at in the context of the regional art? A research conducted in Russia in 2003 (Chesnokova and Cherkesova 2007) found out that the citizens of the Russian Federation tend to interpret class relations in terms of: a) proximity to power and b) relations between the ‘centre’ and the ‘province’. I think that the role of these factors in shaping the relations between different classes in Central Asia is even more significant. We have already identified the government as one of the prescriptive forces determining both the direction of artistic search (for artists to respond to by conformity or opposition) and the degree of social recognition. Now I would like to discuss the other axis of power which plays an equally major role in the class relationship in Central Asian art, i.e. international non-governmental organisations (NGO) which support so-called ‘independent art’. Viewed 20 years ago as disinterested charities aiming to help artists from developing countries to pursue their artistic goals to gain the coveted international recognition, such organisations have firmly established themselves in Central Asia as powerful players dictating their own agenda and projecting their own vision of what Central Asian art should be. Such writers as Daniel John Stevens, Laurence Jarvik, Chris Seiple and many others extensively wrote about the NGOs’ reluctance to engage with the local civil society, their corruptive influence and imposition of foreign standards and so on (see Seiple 2005). In this paper I do not discuss the objectives and work of these organisations per se; instead I would like to examine some of the effects of their interaction with the local artistic environment, which includes not only artists, but other stakeholders and gatekeepers. The attractiveness of the perspectives implicitly and openly offered by the NGOs combined with the relative scarcity of such resources in most Central Asian states has made a profound impact on the artistic community as a whole as well as on individuals. The work of NGOs and NGO- sponsored organisations and projects like the Bactria Centre in Dushanbe, STILLS project in Kazakhstan or the Black Box festival in Tashkent has given a few artists an opportunity to travel and meet with their foreign colleagues, to take part in international events and projects and to contextualise their own art. This, undoubtedly positive function of NGOs in the region should be acknowledged along with the acceptance of the fact that the lure of international recognition and possible material gains have become major factors shaping not only the artistic practices in the region but the whole structure of power distribution within artistic communities. Like their counterparts in governmental agencies, the local employees of Western donors and curators of the organisations supported by them have become powerful gatekeepers of the narrow gates to the outside world. Despite all the good intentions of promoting artistic development in Central Asia, the influence of NGOs on the ethics and professional behaviour of local artists, curators and arts project managers is marked by a prescriptive top-down attitude towards artists and their strive for recognition. Both axes of power, governmental and non-governmental, pursue different agendas but their means and, most importantly, effects on artistic communities are not dissimilar. Ruling classes represented by government ministries or large Western donors, who own both capital and at least some of the means of artistic production (i.e. theatres, galleries, printing facilities and so on) operate through networks of middle class gatekeepers: arts project managers, civil servants, gallery owners and curators. Artists, like the exploited classes in the Marxist theory, either strive for proximity to power, recognition and money; or they rebel and 6 assert their independence and self-identity. I would like to argue that these, often underfinanced and small grassroots groups and independent initiatives, do preserve and sustain the spirit of a true artistic search unimpeded by considerations of immediate commercial success or appreciation by the ruling artistic class. Some of these artists are politically motivated (especially in Kyrgyzstan), most are concerned about various public issues, but their primary focus is artistic, not ideological expression and non-conformism for its own sake. In this sense they continue the tradition of the dissidents of the Soviet period. Some of the most interesting independent projects in the region include, inter alia: some factions in the indigenous rap movement, in particular in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan; the post-industrial goth scene in Tashkent, spearheaded by The Grey Vault group inspired by Rene Guenon and Julius Evola; the Samarkand artistic circle of neo-symbolists The New Number; the Tengri Umai gallery in Almaty; the photographic group Graphia in Bishkek, the Ferghana poetic school, the Omnibus Ensemble in Tashkent, the Kurak art magazine, published in Bishkek by the architect and curator Ulan Japarov; the literary almanac ARK published in Tashkent by the writer Rifat Gumerov; the VideoART.uz festival of independent cinema in Tashkent almost single-handedly run by the director Oleg Karpov, as well as many other artists, writers and musicians. Being involved in some of these projects, I suggested the overarching term ’Central Asian artistic rear-guard’ to denote that type of art which asserts its right for space, free from the dictatorship of the abovementioned extrinsic pressures, or at least offering these prescriptive and domesticating forces some resistance. This resistance, as suggested by the term, is not of a chaotic and rebellious nature, favoured by some younger artists. Neither does it identify itself with the common optimistic notion of artistic avant-garde, or naïve post-colonial contemporaneity. It acknowledges the difficulty of the task to balance the need to preserve some core artistic values and may be even practices and the need to develop in the modern international context–the task which I see as more complex and structured than suggested by Enwezor’s vision of the current artistic context as ‘constellated around the norms of the postcolonial based on the discontinuous, aleatory forms, creolization, hybridization, etc. with a specific cosmopolitan accent.’ (Enwezor 2003, 58) Indeed, as has been acknowledged at the Third Guangzhou Triennial, ‘as a leading discourse for art curatorial practice and criticism, post- colonialism is showing its limitations in being increasingly institutionalised as an ideological concept. Not only is it losing its edge as a critical tool, it has generated its own restrictions that hinder the emergence of artistic creativity and fresh theoretical interface.’ (The Third Guangzhou Triennial 2008) At least where it relates to Central Asia, post-colonial and post-Soviet narratives may overlap but they do not coincide. In fact, as I have tried to demonstrate above, at least some of the nation and culture building programmes of the newly independent states (which would be a part of a post-colonial discourse) simply carry on the Soviet agenda, albeit on a smaller scale. The lessons of relative democratisation and liberalisation of the USSR in the late 1980s have been forgotten and new, ideologies that have replaced Leninist theories are secular, moderate nationalistic, conservative and closely tied to the figure of their creator–the leaders of the state (Abdullaev 2002, 281) and imposed on the population. Artists, art critics and writers who dare openly contradict the new ‘post-colonial’ ideology and aesthetics are ostracised, persecuted or forced to emigrate (Aspden 2010). Once thriving genres of art die out; artistic, musical and 7 literary education is in decline and unique monuments and museums are taken down (Bulkina 2005, 140). I do not intent to elaborate here on the history of cultural and artistic decline in the post-Soviet Central Asia. Huge cultural losses incurred during the years of independence (which include burned books, demolished monuments and buildings, dysfunctional cultural establishments, massive brain drain and so on) deserve a special and profound research and are mentioned here to reinforce the point I made above regarding the complexity of the current shift of the cultural paradigm in Central Asia. To summarise, across all Central Asian countries (albeit to different degrees) we are witnessing the growing gap and tension between the emerging upper classes and the less educated impoverished rural and working classes; in the artistic community the tension is focusing on the interaction between artists, curators and other gatekeepers regulating access to the two principal axes of power pursuing ‘national’ and ‘contemporary’ agendas. The shift of the paradigm from the Soviet to early post-Soviet to the modern narrative is characterised by complex and often controversial processes not always adequately identified and interpreted by external observers, ‘not always successful in guarding against a temptation to romanticize the “otherness” of the people they study.’ (Monaghan and Just, 2000, 26) Although the validity of insider’s research has been often disputed by traditional ethnography, I would like to offer some reflection on my own experience and to outline possible directions for further research that may serve as points of reference rather than recommendations. As an artist I do not find the motivation to catch up with the current (and constantly dating) practices of the contemporary art with their reactive, materialistic ‘worldiness’ particularly inspiring. I would argue that Central Asian artists will benefit if they could re-focus from superficial cultural considerations to the deeper motives of their own creative activities. There is no need to worry about, or even worse, to strive towards the ‘true centralasiannes’: we will have to accept that any art coming from Central Asia is by definition Central Asian art in all its contemporaneity and diversity for one simple reason: there is no other. Neither should local artists be too concerned about being understood, accepted and rewarded by the powerful (local or international) stakeholders for their efforts to embrace contemporaneity where ‘cosmopolitanism is the goal and translation the medium.’ (Smith T. 2011, 181) Working with an artistic idea, artists should, in David Lynch’s words, be primarily concerned whether they are being true to this idea. I believe that the accumulation of artistic value is, indeed, the best way towards self-fulfillment and, ultimately, recognition. Turning to the studies and theories of art, we need to acknowledge that the conceptual gap between the authentic mainstream Central Asian art criticism and the contemporary thought is as large as it could be. A good illustration to the point is the art magazine San’at (The Art) published in Uzbekistan by the Academy of Art. It contains a number of articles by leading art historians and critics of the country and is available in English online at http://www.sanat.orexca.com/. Most articles are written by such well-established and competent authors as Ludmila Kodzaeva, Akbar Khakimov, Elmira Gul, Kamola Akilova and others, who by and large continue the Soviet-era practice of interpreting art in terms of ‘national traditions’ (see Fatkulin 2007). The lack of desire or intention to view Uzbek art in all its diversity in a wider, Central Asian or global context is evident in these works. A similar national ideology underpins the already mentioned programme of ‘ethno-cultural art education’ adopted by the government of Kazakhstan as well as numerous educational and cultural initiatives across the region. They use some elements of the contemporary vocabulary but only to refute Terry Smith’s claim that contemporary art dealt with national boundaries 8 (Smith T. 2011). In all Central Asian states ‘the dominating cultural doctrine is the construction of the ethnocratic state’ (Japarov 2010-2011, 35), and the modern mainstream art histories, theories and criticisms only follow and support it. There are only a few writers about modern Central Asian art who consciously analyse and interpret it in a global context. Among the most influential are Boris Chukhovich (Montreal), Victor Miziano (Moscow), Gamal Bokonbayev (Bishkek), Oksana Shatalova (Rudny), Georgy Mamedov (Dushanbe) and several others. There is also a limited interest towards the modern art of the region shown by the international community of Central Asian scholars (European Society for Central Asian Studies, Central Eurasian Studies Society, Cambridge Central Asia Forum and others) but there are signs that it is growing. So far most internationally relevant studies of the subject has been carried out either by scholars based in institutions outside the region or by local writers supported or commissioned by foreign NGOs. As I have reiterated throughout the paper, this, generally positive development, tends to produce a slightly lopsided view of artistic practices and narratives in Central Asia. There is definitely a need for a more descriptive and agenda-free approach to the topic, focusing on what modern Central Asian art really is in all its diversity. The cross-cultural dimension of artistic research may be complemented by cross-disciplinary studies, applying some methods borrowed from sociology, cultural anthropology, hermeneutics, political studies and other disciplines to the matters of art. Perhaps, ‘participant observation’ of modern art practices and artistic communities could lead to an essentially more profound insight than post- colonial hypothesising about what authentic Central Asian art should be. Fascination with ‘otherness’ and contemporaneity may often be as one-sided and dogmatic as the insistence on ‘national traditions’ being the only true basis for the modern art in the region. There is a clear need for new balanced narratives linking the indigenous Central Asian tradition of art criticism and art history strengthened by reflection to a wide range of modern internationally recognised disciplines and discourses. I hope that this paper is just a small contribution to this necessary and inevitable dialogue. 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