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The exhibition as a part of the Art Prospect & TRASH-5 Festival in Bishkek is showcasing gallery scale art works from participating artists who share stories about pollution in their regions.

Research on textile waste in Bishkek curated  by Bermet Borubaeva, Oksana Kapishnikova, Aimeerim Tursalieva

To show alternative upcycling methods the curators will develop and produce upcycled toys and design-objects from textile waste with seamstresses from Altyn-Kazyk and in future create a Women’s  Cooperative to run production. The design of the dolls will be based on the characters of the fairy tale about Altyn, Kalys and others. Each toy will be complemented by a printed mini-book in the form of a label with short stories of the Book.

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The research will be presented at the  Supermarket DordoiPlaza with upcycling workshops with famous Kyrgyz designers.

Researchers: Bermet Borubaeva, Oxana Kapishnikova, Aimeerim Tursalieva with the support of Saltanat Kalbaeva

Coordination: Irina Agafonova

The research was supported in the framework of the program of the Cultural Center Cuduk and the Cultures of Resistance.

Upcycled toys developed in framework of the project “The Library of saved books” with financial support of The Swiss Embassy in Kyrgyzstan

The paper cups are waiting for the winds of change

 to lift them up

 to paper-cup heaven

 where no one litters

 and the sun is always shining

 and no one expects someone else

 to quietly clean up after them

 (the people who expect someone else)

 they’ll have to learn to clean up

 after themselves once and for all.

 Paper cups always move upwards...

Ermek Jaenisch has been making sketch diaries  @BUCKS_COFFEE_STORIES for several years about the life story of a (plastic?) coffee cup, who loves nature very much and discovered that he was one of the causes of pollution. Plastic dishes appeared 100 years ago as a panacea for dangerous outbreaks of salinization from dirty dishes in public catering establishments. But by the end of the last century, plastic disposable tableware were considered to be one of the causes of catastrophic destruction. This project examines the problem of single-use waste and suggests simple solutions such as reusable coffee cups.

Ermek Jaenisch is an independent artist and photographer from Bishkek and has participated in regional and international art projects, including:  «Metrobish», Installation, and video «Blink of Autumn», «TRASH-Festival-3: Art + Ecology», and the 53rd Venice Biennale, Central Asian Pavilion.

At the opening, everyone who came with their cup The community treats everyone to coffee, who does not, then when buying for the real cost of a disposable cup. We thank the co-founder and the community team for supporting our initiatives and actions.

The children's fairytale book ‘Sparkling Mountain’ recounts  the adventures of school children from the fairy Little country where people live in harmony with nature and each other and one day discover a mountain of trash near their house and begin to explore the world of trash. The story discusses waste issues and ecology, focusing on the life stories of the inhabitants of the  settlements of Altyn-Kazyk and Kalys-Ordo close to the dump side. This book  tells the real story of waste in Bishkek through the main characters schoolgirl Altyn and schoolboy Kalys and teaches many practical and useful things, including teaching family and friends how to sort trash. s. Illustrations from the book will be presented at the exhibition and the fairy tales will come alive through a sound installation with the voices of Kyrgyz actresses. 

Writer: Altyn Kapalova

Illustrations: Cholpon Alamanova

Sound: Idiris kyzy Dinara, Karagulov Argen, Taalaibek kyzy Anara, Kaseinov Jyldyzbek, Ainura Kachkynbek kyzy (narrator)

Design and layout: Diana Ukhina

Idea and production: Aimeerim Tursalieva and Bermet Borubaeva

Interdisciplinary artist sTo Len was the Public Artist in Residence for the NY Department of Sanitation from 2021-2023. During his residency, Len started the Office of In Visibility, an art  project that bears witness to the unseen labor of sanitation and its extensive role in New Yorkers’ lives. He has been using this as a platform to research and re-contextualize the department’s archival material from film and video to printmaking and photography. Len revitalized an old Sanitation screen printing shop in Queens, NY that housed hand-printed street signs and posters dating from the 1960s. Reusing the old equipment and leftover designs, sTo Len has created a series of mono prints on paper that recycle the old sanitation slogans and symbols with his own marbling techniques to create this series. These bold, messy, and psychedelic updates to the originals contain messages that remain relevant and speak to the on-going issues of sanitation, pollution, and climate change that we continue to face today.

In the same Sanitation garage in Queens, NY, sTo Len discovered an old Sanitation television studio that was full of video equipment and hundreds of lost video tapes and film reels. He set up a digitizing station to preserve the footage and using the antiquated video equipment, Len began activating the 500 hours of footage and editing it into short films. These videos originally played on TVs throughout the Department of Sanitation to its 10,000 employees and showed them their own unseen history. Spanning more than a century of documentation, this video collage excerpt captures the world's largest Department of Sanitation at work throughout the years.

For the realization of this idea Gluklya together with  Kyrgyz curators and artists traveled to the countryside around Bishkek for a picnic, where she asked her participants about what they would like to do if they had  a profound amount of free time. Together they gathered in a magic circle and received something that is impossible to grasp being outside of it. After that , artistic methods,imagination and with the help of seamstresses from Altyn Kazyk, Gluklya made some objects from the waste and a video story reflecting this   Magical Encounter

Gluklya (Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya), is regarded as one of the pioneers of post-Soviet, feminist performance art. Her work is about finding ways to talk about traumatic divisions in society, and about how they affect people's lives. Conflicts between political regimes and people's inner worlds are dealt with through drawings, performances in collaboration with diverse groups of people including migrants, installations, and not least what she calls "utopian clothes”.

In 2015 her work 'Clothes for Demonstration Against False Election of Vladimir Putin', was shown for the first time at the Venice Biennale curated by Okwui Enwezor and is still traveling around the world. (last appearance: Glucksman, Fashion Show 2022, upcoming: Resilient Rebels, 2023 Helmond /NL)

In the past Gluklya worked with Factory of Found Clothes, which she created with her fellow artist Tsaplya (1992 to 2012). Since 2002 she has been a  coinitiator and member of Chto Delat, a group of artists, writers, philosophers and activists, who recently immigrated to Germany, the U.S.,and Great Britain.

MAKE’s current artistic and research practice is related to board games. In Bishkek, he will use board game design to conduct artistic research on pollution in the region and organize play tests of the prototype of the game in the public spaces to gather feedback on the game mechanics and the topic of the trash. The final version of the game will be presented as a participatory installation, and later used as an educational tool.

MAKE (Anton Polsky) is a street artist, researcher, urbanist and game designer. He has been active in urban art since the late 1990s, authoring publications on street art, urban activism, and DIY urbanism. In recent years, Polsky has been working at the intersection of artistic research, education, and game design creating research-based educational board games. Polsky has shown work at Art Prospect several times and is the co-founder of the exhibition/festival Partizaning, which held its 2014 iteration in Bishkek. He currently lives with his family in Berlin, where he is working on a dissertation about peripheral street art in Eastern Europe.

MAKE’s current artistic and research practice is related to board games. In Bishkek, he will use board game design to conduct artistic research on pollution in the region and organize play tests of the prototype of the game in the public spaces to gather feedback on the game mechanics and the topic of the trash. The final version of the game will be presented as a participatory installation, and later used as an educational tool.

MAKE (Anton Polsky) is a street artist, researcher, urbanist and game designer. He has been active in urban art since the late 1990s, authoring publications on street art, urban activism, and DIY urbanism. In recent years, Polsky has been working at the intersection of artistic research, education, and game design creating research-based educational board games. Polsky has shown work at Art Prospect several times and is the co-founder of the exhibition/festival Partizaning, which held its 2014 iteration in Bishkek. He currently lives with his family in Berlin, where he is working on a dissertation about peripheral street art in Eastern Europe.

This work stems from her experience with Qazaq Koktemi, a series of peaceful protests within Kazakh civil society in the Spring of 2019. During this time of social upheaval, thousands of Kazakhstanis protested against the fraudulent presidential election and the unlawful renaming of their capital city along with other troubling political events. This work reflects the dynamics of Kazakh protest: its faces, bodies, and  colors. The form of triptych is not accidental. On the one hand, by showing the squeezed and chaotic crowd in the middle of the peaceful steppe, Saule aims to demonstrate the inorganic and bounded space in which people were constrained. On the other hand, she wants to show that in the steppe - the inherent part of Kazakh mindset - protest, as civic activity, may re-acquire new existential features. 

This work, like many of Saule’s recent works, is made from plastic bags. Since 2014, plastic gradually became a quintessential expression of the artist’s experience within life and art. The plastic she uses comes from people from different countries, with different backgrounds and life stories. When she uses plastic she recycles not only material artefacts, but also different social and cultural attitudes about the life cycle. This work is about basic civic rights, or their absence. This connects the civic movement in Kazakhstan to those happening in many parts of the world, namely Kyrgyzstan, Hong Kong, Russia, Turkey, France, etc. Through the work, Saule expresses a profound sentiment of belonging to protesters around the world and, ultimately, should be read as an expression of métissage and of the inseparable links of political and environmental activism and artistic praxis.

This photo series and documentary film tell the story of the dozens of tons of undisposed hazardous waste at the silicon plant in Tash-Kömür that perpetually threaten the entire region with environmental disaster. On August 25, 1995, the former high-tech Soviet semiconductor plant in Tash-Kömür became the state-owned corporation Kristall.

Today, the plant is privately owned; volatile toxic substances previously used in production have built up on site, corroding their rusty tanks and leaking onto and weakening nearby rebar and concrete. At any moment, this could cause a man-made disaster affecting Tash-Kömür and the Naryn River watershed to its southeast.

This project was completed by the Environmental Monitoring and Research Foundation (EcoMiR) team with the financial support of Internews in Kyrgyzstan’s TRACK program: Gamal Soronkulov, Vladislav Ushakov, Bermet Borubaeva, and Yaroslav Tartykov.

Concept: Suidumbek Kalmurzayev and Gamal Soronkulov

Photographs: Vladislav Ushakov

Video: Iskender Aliev

Archival research: Bermet Borubayeva

Fact-checking: Yaroslav Tartykov

Translation: Nazgul Abdyrazakova

October 10–19, 2023

Full program 

Everything is alive, everything changes, and at each point of change we influence the course of the future. The starting point for environmental sustainability and harmonization is healing our relationship with ourselves (our inner ecology), which translates into our interactions with the reality we create, as everything is an extension of us.

The public program space The Ecology of Consciousness: Upcycling, a part of the festival Interpreting the History of Pollution: Art Prospect and Trash-5, focuses on potential methods of art, creation, and consumption. What can we make out of what’s at hand, without beginning another cycle of manufacturing? How can we reshape ourselves and make meaning and zones of creativity and communication by re-configuring what we already have?

In the same vein, the space for this public program is being created from available materials: supplies from previous exhibitions and projects at the Bishkek School of Contemporary Art and the art studio Synergy; functional and creative sculptures made of scrap textiles; interior decorations and crafts borrowed from friends. All of the program's events are also either drawn from things that either have already been created or are a side product of the artistic process (videos, publications, collages, craftivism), or they do not require manufacturing any new objects (breathwork and relaxation, exchange of ideas, reassembling of meanings, reading, tea parties).

In this public space, we will feel out, live through, and gain awareness of many ecologies: of consciousness, of relationships and actions, of the body.

The space was built by the creative labor of Bermet Borubaeva, Aimeerim Tursalieva, Chynarkul Zhusupkeldieva, Adel Ismailkhanova, Alima Tokmergenova, Syinat Joldosheva, Diana Ukhina, Talgat Berikov, and our volunteers, as well as by the hands of unknown craftswomen.