Asar! Together We Build: Central Asian Cultural Festival

Anvar Musrepov is a curator, artist, editor-in-chief and art publicist who lives and works in Almaty, Kazakhstan. He graduated from the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and New Media and is currently studying for a master’s degree at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. 

Musrepov works in different directions and uses new media to develop the decolonisation of future narratives. As a curator, he works sustainably on educational projects focusing on the evolution of the emerging contemporary art scene and the integration of new approaches into the practice of museum exhibitions in Kazakhstan. As an artist since the beginning of his career, he researched the links between local identity and futurism, using installations, digital art, performance and video essays.

Musrepov currently works as a conceptual producer at Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture, the editor-in-chief of the online anthology Horizon, and a contributor to educational programmes. He curated the KORKUT Biennale of Sound Art and New Music in 2022. He also publishes on iada.org and other platforms about the art of the Central Asian region.

Wang Weiwei is currently the Curator of Exhibitions and Collections at CHAT. From 2010 to 2017, Wang was the curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai (MoCA Shanghai). In 2017, Wang participated at the Curator-in-Residence Programme at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts in Taiwan, and the International Researcher Programme at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, South Korea. Wang was then appointed as the co-curator at the 12th Shanghai Biennale and awarded an Individual Fellowship by Asian Cultural Council Hong Kong in 2018. She has conducted on a series of researches on East Asian Contemporary Arts since 2017.

Meder Akhmetov is an artist, architect, curator and member of the MUSEUM art group based in Central Asia. His artwork ranges from hand drawings and photo collages to outdoor public art. Akhmetov curates and organises workshops and public art events. Much of his work is based on working in a participatory workshop genre. During the pandemic in 2020, he initiated the self-organised online platform ‘art bazaar’ on Facebook.

Chen King Yuen Joseph is an art and cultural organiser and artist based in Hong Kong, currently the Director of Culture at Eaton HK, a purpose-driven hospitality brand where he builds community for artists, changemakers and marginalised groups and creates cultural and creative initiatives to support locals and serve travellers. He is the co-founder of Virtue Village, an art initiative creating and curating art that connects humans to spirituality and intimacy, and navigates the planes of queer subculture, fetish and posthumanism. The works of Virtue Village have been exhibited at the Myth Makers – Spectrosynthesis III, a major LGBTQ+ art exhibition in Tai Kwun.

Chong Chin-Yin is a Hong Kong- and Taiwan-based curator and co-founder of Arts Collective, a creative entity based in Hong Kong. Chong’s interests reside in the intersection of cultural influence, experience, artistic practice and community. Working collectively and independently, her recent research explores contemporary arts in geocultural contexts and transdisciplinary exchange and collaboration.

Ulan Dzhaparov is an architect, independent contemporary art curator and artist from Bishkek. He graduated from the faculty of architecture, Frunze Polytechnic Institute in 1983. Currently, he works as the general director at the architectural studio ‘MUSEUM’ in Bishkek. As an artist, he uses various mediums including performance, video and graphics and participated in a number of international contemporary art exhibitions.

As a curator, he has curated the annual Bishkek April Fools’ competitions since 2003, as well as the annual Lazy Art workshops on the southern shore of Lake Issyk-Kul since 2009. He is the former editor of Central Asian Almanac KURAK as well as Literary and Artistic Almanac Urbi et Orbi.

Aigerim Kapar is a Kazakh interdependent curator, interdisciplinary researcher and decolonial activist. She founded Artcom Platform, a Central Asian community-based contemporary art and public engagement organisation in 2015. Grassroots-driven agenda in Central Asia matters to her curatorial practice. With her team at Artcom Platform, Kapar curates and organises collaborative knowledge production, public art and science education, art interventions and research-based exhibitions. In 2017, Kapar initiated Art Collider, a school where art meets science bringing communities together around practices of care and solidarity. 

Currently, Kapar curates long-term projects of engagement and advocacy for lake ecosystems in Kazakhstan SOS Taldykol, Balqashqa Qamqor. In 2020, she united Central Asian artists, cultural practitioners, and researchers to initiate and co-create a hybrid reality project Steppe Space for contemporary art and culture of Central Asia.

Her previous key works include Re-membering: Dialogues of memories (2019), an international intergenerational project in memory of survivors and victims of 20th-century political repressions in Kazakhstan and Time & Astana: After Future (2017-18), an urban art research and engagement project.

Arystanbek Shalbayev is a Kazakh interdisciplinary artist who combines his creative work with his teaching career. After graduating from the Almaty State Theater and Art Institute in 1984, he started teaching at the Shymkent Art College after Kasteev. He worked as a head of the cycle of composition until 1989. From 1989 until now he has taught at the Kazakh National Academy of Arts named after T. Zhurgenov at the Department of Interior and Furniture Design.

He is a core member of the Kyzyl Tractor art group. Since its formation in 1991, Shalbayev has constantly taken part in various contemporary art exhibitions and festivals in Kazakhstan and abroad. His works encompass performance, installation, photography and video art.

Shalbayev is also a member of the Union of Artists of the Republic of Kazakhstan, and a corresponding member of the Academy of Arts of the Republic of Kazakhstan in 1979.

Acell Shaldibayeva is an artist and DJ from Almaty, Kazakhstan. She is also the co-founder of the techno club bULt, which comprehends topics such as traditions and rituals, decolonial optics, queer feminism, and its place and role in the reality of Kazakhstan and Central Asia by regularly holding techno parties, film screenings of non-mainstream art films, supporting research and art projects, and conducting master classes, lectures, poetry readings and exhibitions.

As a sound artist, Shaldibayeva was part of the ORTA collective, which engages in modern performance practices and participated in the NONAME 2021 festival at the Meyerhold Centre, Moscow. Together with Kazakh poet Anuar Duisenbinov, she also runs a series of sound poetry experiments to create a sound environment with ambient layers and electronic beats, in which sound and text are woven into a single fabric, reinforcing each other and erasing the boundaries between them.

Shaldibayeva’s experimental mix became the musical basis for a theatrical production of the choreographic group Jolda The Voice Inside. She played at the Boiler Room’s event ‘Contemporary Scenes’ in 2021.

Eunice Tsang is a curator and artist based in Hong Kong. She founded and curates Current Plans, an alternative art space in Sham Shui Po that encourages cross-disciplinary dialogues through exhibition-making. Previously, she set up the Asian Artist Book Library in Tai Kwun Contemporary, focusing her research on independent publishing in Asia and modes of creative distribution. Her curatorial interests lie in how artists develop new languages and symbols in times of political change, and how to maneuver the liminal space between legal and illegal, fact and fiction, using magic-realism, sarcasm, humour and myth-making.

Current Plans supports cross-disciplinary creative experimentations, stimulate knowledge exchange and encourage playful connections that push the boundaries of contemporary exhibition-making. As a hybrid space for disseminating a plethora of practices, Current Plans hopes to engage creatives who are open to a co-generative model of working and sharing.

Alexey Ulko is an Uzbek art critic and curator. He graduated from the Samarkand University as a teacher of the English Language and Literature in 1991 and obtained an MEd TTELT degree from the University of Exeter, UK in 2001. Since 2003, he has been working as a freelance consultant in culture, arts and language for a range of international organisations.

In the mid-2000s, he started a new career as a contemporary art critic and curator and took part in a range of international and regional conferences and events organised by associations such as Association of Art Historians, European Society for Central Asian Studies and Central Eurasian Studies Society. In 2007 and 2008, he received awards for the best video art from the Museum of Cinema and Association of Film-makers of Uzbekistan. In 2011, he was a member of jury at the Central Asian Festival of Independent Cinema and in 2014 the chairman of the jury at the Novellasia Literary Festival. Ulko is also an author of over 40 articles about contemporary Central Asian art and culture and the book Uzbekistan Customs and Culture in the series Culture Smart! by Kuperard Publishers, UK (2016).

Adilkhan Yerzhanov is a film director and scriptwriter born in 1982 in Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan. 

In 2009, he graduated from the Kazakh National Academy of Arts. Yerzhanov’s films have been screened and awarded at many international film festivals. He was a two-time participant of the Venice International Film festival (2020, 2022) and Cannes Film Festival (2014, 2018). He was the recipient of the ‘Asia Pacific Screen Awards’ for ‘Achievement in Directing’ in 2019 and the APSA Film Fund Development grant for A Dark, Dark Man (2019). In 2017, he was a member of the international jury of ‘Asia Pacific Screen Awards’. His film The Owners (2014) was included in the Asian Cinema 100 catalogue, published in 2015 by Busan International Film Festival.