Art Plov CA is an international multidisciplinary art project curated by Ashot Danielyan and Alexey Ulko, first-year participants of the Creative Producers programme. The project involves collaborations in poetry, visual arts, photography and performative art aimed at developing an alternative regional art scene, creating new opportunities for realising creative potential and popularising contemporary art among young people in Uzbekistan and Central Asia.
The project has brought together more than 40 participants from the five countries of the region working across different media in pairs or small groups. The poets, artists and photographers from Kazakhstan have been remotely collaborating with each other and their peers in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. This transboundary collaboration is the essence and the developmental focus of the project as the participants had to learn how to generate ideas together, how to adapt, work at a distance and to negotiate meanings to certain guidelines and deadlines. It encourages the participants to generate new art as much as possible rather than to dig out their older artworks and texts.
The physical outcome of the project is a book, partly printed in colour and containing various forms of artistic dialogue: artists responding to poems, photographers working off texts, poets writing their texts in response to photographic series, graphics or paintings. The publication is subdivided into six smaller sections dedicated to the following topics:
- urban space
- the apocalypse
- the body and gender
- freedom
- cultural hybridity
- universe
A version of the publication will be available in the .pdf format on 25 March 2021, the launch day of the project .
Another dimension/output of the project is a series of short videos developed by curators together with actors from the Ilkhom Theatre (Tashkent) reading some of the poems created for the project which you can watch on our YouTube channel.