Being part of the Kazakh diaspora of Kazakhs that had emigrated from Western China (Xinjiang province) to Turkey in the 1950s, I was born and raised in the Western hemisphere. However, like most of the Kazakhs of the diaspora, I was also raised in a small community of Kazakhs, learning the language and certain […]
Recently, you may have noticed a new addition to the weblogs called Artpologist.net. This blog documents the life of an art project that I’ve started working on with several artists and an anthropologist from Kazakhstan.
The project focuses on the studios and personal spaces of artists amidst the dramatic building boom influencing the daily […]
Recently I went to visit the Soros Center for Contemporary Art and witnessed the beginning of the destruction of this art community center on Tulebaev Street. They were already putting up the synonymous metal walls to hide the destruction.
The Soros Center for Contemporary Art has been housed in this humble constructivist building for almost […]
A positive and progressive step was taken towards implementing a sustainable approach to urban planning in Kazakhstan recently.
The administration of Shymkent has reached out to the community of artists and intellectuals to integrate their ideas into the process of building a new city. They organized a round table discussion involving twenty […]
This is a translation of Vitaliy Mantrov’s article, which was posted on February 15, 2007
February 15th was the day of the removal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. In 1982, 19 year old Sharipjan only finished school and entered into the technical institute, when he was called into army. After only a month of serving […]
Now, when you think about different ethnicities that are represented in Kazakhstan, mainly due to deportations in the Soviet time, the Czechs do not usually come to one’s mind. However, it seems that there were several hundred members of the Czech community, who settled in Kazakhstan starting from the mid-19th century. The Czech […]
Recent excavations of the Botai Culture sites of Krasnyi Yar and Vasilkovka in northern Kazakhstan have unearthed an ancient corral for keeping horses. Now, the fact that Kazakhs have a long-standing equine tradition is not news per se, but evidence suggests that the ancient inhabitants of what is today Kazakhstan were among the first […]
Kazakh refugees celebrated their fiftieth anniversary in Turkey at the end of August this year. Thousands of Kazakh families fled from Eastern Turkistan, today’s China’s Xinjiang province, first from the nationalist Chinese government, then from the Chinese Communist suppression since the beginning of the thirties.
These two large groups left their homes in search […]
The term “Great Game” conjures up characters from Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, along with larger-than-life historical figures, predominantly from Britain, such as Charles Stoddart (of the ill-fated mission to Bukhara), Sir Arthur Conolly, among others. They were gentlemen, adventurers, historians, spies, geographers, and academics all at once; most of the alter-egos over at […]
