Tashkent artist, filmmaker, and collector Oleg Karpov will share his experience of gathering an archive outside of institutions and show some artworks based on his collection.
Oleg Karpov’s Photo Archive of Turkestan is an independent collection that he has been gathering for the past eleven years in Tashkent and which contains tens of thousands of items. Its name refers to the medieval endonym of Central Asia, which literally means «the land of the Turks.» Along with photographs taken in the region, the collection includes photographs from elsewhere (for example, from Russia), as many people brought their complicated family histories with them when they moved to Uzbekistan. The archive comes from private collections, including family archives and private archives of photographers, and institutional collections that were thrown away or disposed of after the fall of the USSR. Around 100,000 photographs have been sorted and attributed, and many are still awaiting their turn, but even today the archive is in many ways superior to the Central State Archive of Film, Photographic, and Audio Documents of Uzbekistan.
Oleg Karpov will talk about how and why he began compiling the archive, explain how it is different from state archives, and discuss its advantages, disadvantages, and uses. He will also present some of the items from his collection, as well as some artworks that are based on it.