Experimental film, video art, and independent art practices of Uzbekistan presented in the context of media archeology and archive work.
Independent film and art in the Soviet and post-Soviet countries developed not only outside the state archives, studios, and institutions but to some extent despite them. Experimental cinema, which emerged in the USSR in the 1980s, developed in parallel in different Soviet republics based on a network of amateur film studios that offered «non-professional» filmmakers access to cameras, film, and editing tools. This was how Moscow’s «parallel cinema» appeared, as well as Leningrad’s Necrorealism and the experimental cinema of Uzbekistan, whose pioneers using 16 mm film moved away from imitating big studio productions and started discovering new narrative forms, unaware of similar developments in other large cities of the Soviet Union.
The program prepared by independent Russian curator Alexey Artamonov, who now lives in Tashkent, explores not so much the synchrony of historical development in the post-Soviet countries as a subjective dimension of researchers’ and artists’ archival work.
As in archeology, in the study of private archives historical layers reveal themselves gradually—layer after layer—through new connections and a growing personal interest. The Garage Screen program will present several such layers of independent film and art practices that have developed in Uzbekistan over the past forty years.
The «top layer» will be represented by Oleg Karpov’s Photo Archive of Turkestan, gathered over the last eleven years in Tashkent. It is an independent archive based on private collections of Central Asian photographers of the post-Soviet, Soviet, and even pre-Revolutionary periods, which contains tens of thousands of items. Its name refers to the colonial name for Central Asia, which came into use in the nineteenth century and literally means «land of the Turks». In his artist talk «Archive Mania: An Attempt at Gathering an Amateur Archive as a Utopia of Resistance, ” artist, filmmaker, and collector Oleg Karpov will speak about the making of his archive and the reasons behind it and present some of the items from his collection, as well as some art works based on it.
The «second layer» is the history of Uzbekistan’s video art of the independence era, based on the materials of the festival videoART.uz, which took place in Tashkent between 2007 and 2017 and was run by Oleg Karpov. The festival’s twenty-eight programs were released on DVD and became a private archive. Based on his work with this archive, Alexey Artamonov has compiled for Garage Screen the program Murmur of the Cultural Rearguard.
The screening will be followed by a Q& A with the founder and creator of videoART.uz Oleg Karpov, the filmmakers, and the program’s curator Alexey Artamonov, who will share his experience of working with the archive and discuss retrospective programs based on it in Russia, Uzbekistan, and Europe.
The final part in the exploration of Central Asian independent cinema is a retrospective of pioneering filmmakers from Uzbekistan Dmitry and Anzhela Trofimov, whose films date back to the mid-1980s. After Dmitry passed away in April 2022, Alexey Artamonov travelled to the Moscow Region to study the archive he left behind. Based on the materials he found during the trip, he developed a retrospective program of Dmitry’s works in collaboration with Anzhela Trofimova, Restoration of Dreams, which will be presented by Garage Screen. The screening will be followed by a Q& A with Anzhela Trofimov and Alexey Artamonov.