Artcom Platform

Since 2020, the women-led collective of artists and researchers Artcom Platform has developed new systems of care for Kazakhstan’s Lake Balkhash. The sickle-shaped lake is one of the world’s largest, but it faces the same threats from over-extraction and climate change that have drained the Aral Sea and other nearby bodies of water. Kazakhstan has recently agreed on building a nuclear plant on Balkhash’s shores, further endangering the surrounding environment.

To find hope for this natural resource, Artcom Platform turns to the tactics of Qazaqlïq, the semi-nomadic tradition of “steppe democracy” that has allowed the Kazakh people to preserve their way of life even under colonial oppression and forced sedentarization. Qazaqlïq implies a voluntary rejection of social and legal constraints, a willful fugitivity in the pursuit of true freedom. The collective is drawn to the medium of video, as the digital camera is capable of recreating the perspective of someone moving through the landscape on horseback. They use this format to create Balkhash Zhyry, a video essay on the various attacks on the lake’s ecosystems told in the voice of the lake itself. The video is presented within a structure fashioned from steppe reeds, nodding to a tradition of weaving as collective practice.

As a second gesture, Artcom Platform intervenes within the stairwell of the former courthouse with a silent monument that commemorates the individuals across Kazakhstan who were killed, detained or tortured in 2022, in an uprising known as “Bloody January.” Triggered by skyrocketing petroleum prices, the peaceful protests expressed increasing discontent with the government, who in turn labeled its own citizens “terrorists” to justify lethal force in its response.

Text: Kate Sutton