In March 2014, Ibraaz and the Kamel Lazaar Foundation launched an online media partnership with Art Dubai 2014 for the eighth iteration of the Global Art Forum.

In this transcription from the Forum Shumon Basar, Ala Younis, Omar Berrada, and Payam Shafiri present Masha Kirasirova, who reflects on the subject of Soviet Orientalism.

Shumon: Hello. Assalam alaikum. Privet. Nihao. My name is Shumon Basar, I am the commissioner of the Global Art Forum. Our formidable team for these three days here in Dubai include my co-directors on the left Omar Barada and Ala Younis. Also Uns Kattan, Miriam Butti and our key protagonists in Team Art Dubai. This is actually Day Four of the Forum. Days One and Two happened on Saturday and Sunday in Doha at Katara Art Center and we are deeply grateful to them and to the Qatar Museum Authority for hosting us and hosting those initial two days. Thank you also to our benefactors Dubai Culture and Arts Authority and The Arab Fund for Art and Culture. Thank you also to Ibraaz/Kamel Lazaar Foundation for streaming us online and providing us with the means to be bilingual. So, for those of you, if you want to listen to any of the discussions that are in English and in Arabic or of course, vice versa, there are headsets available outside throughout the three days. Lastly, the International New York Times is our international media partner. One important bit of housekeeping, please can you turn your mobile phones to silent right now, please, thank you. And if you wish to tweet at all during the next three hours, the hashtag that we are using is #GAF8. Some of you may have been here yesterday, we are going to keep this introduction necessarily brief. But just to say that the ambition of the Global Art Forum is that it takes pleasure in thinking – in the modes of thinking, the modes of address – and makes this public. It is a media production, a temporary university, and a TV show without a television. Could we please play the clip?

Enemy of historical continuity and of historical memory?

Yes. Because for one thing, you see, the mechanisms, and the past are always mechanisms by which the young generation is linked with the older generations. For instance, Marc Bloch, the great French historian, once pointed out that in actual fact, in agrarian societies continuity is maintained by jumping generations. Children are brought up by grandparents because parents go out and work in the fields and so consequently children immediately get introduced to what grandparents remember about their past and so on in turn.

And that's been broken up in our century.

This has been broken completely for a variety of reasons. For one thing, indeed, the experience of the past is quite often no longer relevant, and no longer seems relevant for the younger generation and consequently it becomes something different. The only past which people, very young people, really recognize is their own personal past. The rest is something like olden times.

Can you travel in space? I mean, can you travel in time?

We don't know. Of course, we do travel in time all the time, we move back and forth. I discovered a man named J.W. Dunne who analysed time in a book called Experiment With Time (1927), and he found that dreams not only consisted of the past but the future as well. I have found this to be true since I write my dreams down and very often I will dream something which then later happens. So in that sense yes, I think it is easier to travel into the future, in a real sense, than into the past.

Ala: So 'Meanwhile...History' basically represents an imagined timeline of transformational points between the 'meanwhile' and 'history', many of which have been lost, forgotten, or erased. The title is courtesy of Sophia Al Maria and the two historians, the two figures we saw in the clips were Eric Hobsbawm and the historian and the writer William Burroughs.

Omar: Just to recap on yesterday, which was the first day of the Global Art Forum in Dubai, we went back to the beginning of the end of pearling in the Trucial States. We then skipped forward to Dubai's architecture and urban planning of the short 70s. We heard about an expanding collection of Iranian art that shored up here in Dubai. And lastly, we time travelled back to the fourteenth century to hear about why Ibn Khaldun should be remembered or, indeed, why he should be forgotten. And today we will tour to Soviet Orientalism, then a century of Documenta, followed by Pan-Kafirism. And finally, we will look at our favorite 'ism' of the week, which is Seventies-ism, and we will look at how the short 70s were marked in different locations around the world: Chile, Greece, and Iran. Shumon will speak a few words about the other elements that are involved in Global Art Forum other than the sessions in this room, and then we will leave the floor to our speakers.

Shumon: Thank you, Omar. So between the sessions we will be playing a set of short 'video postcards'. These are commissions by two artists. The first is by Raja'a Khalid and she has done a set of these video postcards that are almost transmissions from an era in America, the beginning of the kind of Cold War paranoia and a very interesting television programme called The Big Picture (1951–1964). Paired with this are a set of other 'video postcards' from Sarah Abu Abdullah and she is looking for something very different and it relates to what Eric Hobsbawm just said, where what seems to matter more to most people today are their own personal histories. So we asked Sara to look at this in relation to the whole construct of the Facebook timeline, which is of course how people narrativize and historicize their own lives today using digital technology. Another artist commission is Annabel Daou. She is sitting outside there in the corner and her performance fortune which takes place at 2 O'Clock every day is looking into peoples' futures through a series of silent readings. Hind Mezaina has also made a montage for 'Meanwhile...Meanwhile', which we will see on Friday. And we have made a number of these badges or pins. Today, I'm wearing 'Meanwhile... Anthropocene' and 'Meanwhile...Zombies'. So these are available, there are six of them, feel free to take some. And lastly the Forum Forum, which is the space over in front of Hall One, is our satellite space for the Global Art Forum. It is a media art repository, which also includes a selection of archive video recordings from previous year sessions. The last two, the 'Medium of Media' and 'It Means This', as well as our publishing initiative Globe Books, and the video commissions and clips that you see are also available there. We are uploading the recordings from the previous days so there is immediate archiving of what is happening here. So to get things going, I would like to now introduce our first guest who is actually going to introduce our real first guest. So I want to introduce Slavs and Tatars to make the first introduction of the day. This is because, for us, it is really important to make a link to that curated Marker section which is concerned with the Caucasus and Central Asia. And of course, we're next to Art Dubai Modern, a new initiative. So this theme of excavating both times and spaces that perhaps have been lost, erased, or forgotten in various crevices of memory and history is something that is shared between a number of the programmes here. So will you please join me in welcoming Slavs and Tatars. Thank you very much, enjoy the afternoon.

Payam Sharifi: Thank you Shumon, and thank you to the Global Art Forum team, I will try to keep this very brief. We're very happy and honoured to introduce Masha Kirasirova, who is a professor at NYU Abu Dhabi. She is a historian and scholar on the exchange of ideas between Soviet Eurasia and the Middle East so very much relevant to the Marker project and namely, the Marker project being in the Gulf as opposed to elsewhere. This is, I hope, the first of many interactions with Masha and NYU Abu Dhabi and we are looking forward to working with her and other scholars at NYU to inaugurate the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery in March next year. So, Soviet Orientalism is a phenomenon that we have become interested in the past couple of years. It is an interesting counterpoint in some ways and an extension of Orientalism in the sense that it offers a certain different reading to what we consider as the British and French model. In some ways, the British and French went too far afield to colonize nations and peoples that were very different from them, and I would argue that perhaps Russian Orientalism or Soviet Orientalism did not go so far away, but rather right across the border. In fact, the Russians were probably colonized by those very peoples or some of those very peoples several centuries earlier. Also, the Bolsheviks had to, to a certain extent, pay lip service to the anti-imperialist or anti-colonial ideologies of their more entrepreneurial capitalist enemies. In any case, we are very much looking forward to hearing what Masha Kirasirova will talk to us about today. Thank you, and join me in welcoming Masha to the stage.

Masha Kirasirova: Good afternoon. First of all, I would like to thank the organizers of this forum for giving me the opportunity to speak to you all today about a topic that has intrusted me for quite some time. When asked to contribute to a historical outline by focusing on an important moment in the history of Russian Orientalism, the event that immediately came to my mind was the First Congress of the Peoples of the East, which was held during the first week of September 1920 in Baku, then the capital of Soviet Azerbaijan. At this massive international gathering, political activists, Communists, non-Communist party members and a variety of other delegates from regions that would soon be delineated into the new Soviet Republics of Central Asia and the Caucasus but also from the foreign East – territories that included Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and also, a handful of Arabs – came together to discuss common strategies of how to fight imperialist domination and capitalist exploitation. During my talk today, I will first discuss the significance of this event for Soviet politics and for the region. Then, since I figured most of you guys are interested in art, I will focus on how this particular moment was reflected in the aesthetic representations of the East by comparing paintings from the late Russian imperial periods and the early Soviet periods.

The idea for organizing the Congress of the Peoples of the East had emerged a few months earlier, during the summer of 1920 among the leaders of workers' parties of Russia and Western Europe. It was during the Second Congress of the Communist International, or the Comintern, held between July and August of 1920 in Moscow that, for the first time since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the subject of a revolution in the East had featured prominently in the discussions, policies, and future political commitments of Lenin and other international Communists. The reason for this new focus on the East at the Second Comintern Congress was largely political. Prospects for immediate European revolution were beginning to wane after such major setbacks as the collapse of the Communist government in Hungary, which was overcome by Romanian troops in 1919, and other political disappointments for the Bolsheviks in Europe. You can see in this photograph Zinoviev, who was the head of the Communist International, sitting at the centre of this group of people in Baku, leading a discussion about the future of the Revolution in the East. Meanwhile, inside the new Russian republic, after the Bolshevik Revolution, influential Muslim Bolshevik officials, for example, the Tatar Communist Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev had been encouraging Lenin to acknowledge the potential revolutionary significance of countries and peoples of the East. So, for example, in a pamphlet entitled Social Revolution in the East, Sultan-Galiev argued in 1919 that up until that point, world revolution had really meant revolution in the west and the east had been entirely neglected. Besides Sultan-Galiev, other prominent Communists such as the Indian Communist M. N. Roy, who was at the Second Congress of the Comintern, also argued that the fate of Communism around the world depended on the victory of the Socialist Revolution in the East. So, by the summer of 1920, Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders started to take such suggestions as the one by Sultan-Galiev and M.N. Roy more seriously, incorporating them into the new policy of the Comintern. The decision to convene the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku presented the first attempt at a large scale international effort to mobilize people and to export this Revolution eastwards. As the Comintern chairman Zinoviev later told the Baku gathering, its sessions were the complement, or the second part, of the Comintern World Congress that had just been held in Moscow a few months earlier. Together, the Second Comintern Congress and the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku put colonial revolution at the forefront of the priorities of the new Communist government and also, as one scholar of postcolonialism Robert Young has argued, irrevocably changed the dynamics of anticolonial resistance around the world. For the first time, anticolonial struggles could be articulated within a wider framework and more importantly, could look to a major power for organizational, material and military support. This Congress at Baku was important in that it altered the language, if not always the practice, of the Bolsheviks' relationship to the East, defining it as an important ally in the global struggle against capitalism and imperialism.

Now, the timing of the Baku Congress was also significant, because it was on 2 September 1920, the second day of this congress, that the highest ranking Red Army commander in Central Asia, Mikhail Frunze, wired Lenin informing him that the emirate of Bukhara had been captured in a joint effort of the Russian Red Army and Bukharan units, and that the Emir had fled. So here you can see a picture of the last Emir of Bukhara and that is Mikhail Frunze who defeated him. A new Bukharan government was thus formed the same day on 2 September, and the Bukharan People's Soviet Republic was officially established. The Central Asian Khanate of Khiva had already been conquered earlier that year in February 1920 and a new government had also been created there. The success of this Bukharan so-called revolution was announced at the Baku Congress but interestingly enough, it was announced in Uzbek and was not translated into Russian or any of the other languages spoken by the vast majority of the delegates present. Moreover, its description was completely omitted from all official records. So all the transcripts of this Baku Congress say that someone came and announced the liberation of Bukhara and spoke about it in detail, but none of it is present in the text. So if any of the members actually managed to hear, let alone understand this announcement, the suppression of all details is not really surprising considering the bloody and horrific nature of the fighting in Central Asia, which we know from reading classified secret reports in the archives was an incredibly bloody and horrific affair. Moreover, people continued to fight and resist Soviet rule long into the 1920s and early 30s and some might argue much later than that. So, the details of this conquest or liberation were incredibly politically significant. The violent details of these so-called revolutions were suppressed because, as former Russian protectorates, Bukhara and Khiva, were not unlike their neighbour Turkestan, which Lenin explicitly called a Russian imperial colony in his seminal text, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, which he published in 1916. So these areas came to occupy a central place in the identity and the very image of the revolutionary Bolshevik state, which was that of an explicitly anti-imperial, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist power. So, the creation of this new narrative-one of liberation and of incorporation of these former colonies, first as the Bukharan and Khorezm People's Soviet Republics, and then as Uzbek and Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republics after the national delineation of 1924--became the responsibility of the Bolshevik leaders, intellectuals, writers, and also artists.

The importance of visual propaganda in this process cannot and was not underestimated by anyone involved. From one of the few surviving accounts of the Bukharan Revolution, from the memoirs of the aforementioned Indian Communist M.N. Roy, who travelled after the Second Comintern Congress to Turkestan, we learn that at the moment of the Revolution, the Revolutionary Committee proclaimed itself to be the new provisional government and took the reins of power in Bukhara and its aims and objectives were printed clearly on huge posters and stuck upon the walls throughout the city. This is a photograph of the Red Army on the day of the liberation or the revolution of Bukhara. The importance of written and visual propaganda was also explicitly addressed at the Baku Congress itself, which created a special Council for Propaganda and Action under the aegis of the Comintern. This new organization, with branches in Baku and Tashkent, was responsible for organizing propaganda throughout the East in an effort to support and unify the liberation movement throughout the area. The leadership of this Council included high ranking Comintern officials like Zinoviev and others, demonstrating a high level of Comintern attention to the production of the visual and written revolutionary messages. So the question is then, how did all of these political happenings and shifts affect how the east was depicted, and how does this help us understand this moment in the larger context of the history of Orientalism? I think the answer to this question is linked to both the changes in the intellectual approaches to the study of the Orient happening at this time as well as the changes to the aesthetic languages and currents.

In the realm of academic Orientalism, the early 1920s underwent a massive change, embodied in the emergence of a new Marxist Oriental Association, which was highly critical of earlier bourgeois Russian scholarship that continued in parallel into the 1920s and 30s. This new Marxist Association, formed under Stalin's Commissariat of Nationalities and so directly responsible to part of the government administration, was chaired by Mikhail Pavlovich, a key organizer of the Baku Congress and also the member of the board for its Council for Propaganda and Action. (He was also shown in that earlier picture seated next to Zinoviev.) The main tasks of this Marxist Orientalist association, as understood by the group's leadership, included providing the new Soviet government with the necessary political and socio-economic knowledge to support the liberation of the contemporary east from colonialism and imperialism. Its new journal, called Novyi Vostok, or 'The New Orient', was vehemently anti-Orientalist in its rhetoric, and had attacked earlier bourgeois approaches to studying the East, which were mostly philological and focused on pre-modern historical periods. Instead, the Association went to great lengths to emphasize the importance of contemporary culture, modern history, and the political economy of the so called 'East', which was an area that until 1925 included both Central Asia and the Caucasus as well as the broader foreign eastern regions of the Middle East, India, Pakistan, and so on. Nevertheless, as historians of this movement have pointed out, despite the polemical attacks on this earlier scholarship, articles in the journal continued to use similar methodologies to the ones they were condemning as 'western' Oriental studies.

Now, in the case of the visual representations, I think a similar shift can be observed. Indeed, the ever-growing body of scholarship about Orientalism has shown the many connections between representations of the east as an object of scholarly study and also its representations in literature and painting. Even the literary scholar Edward Said, for example, in his seminal 1978 study Orientialism, devoted significant attention to romantic representations of the Orient in painting as an exotic locale with static, frozen, and essentially fixed scenery and people. Such representations, he argued, allowed the reader to apprehend not only the Orient, but also the Orientalist as an interpreter, exhibitor, mediator, and representative expert. The interesting point here though is that Edward Said did not include Russian Orientalism in his analysis. Scholars have, at least for over a decade, been debating and researching what has really become a new sub-field of Russian history. A host of new books have recently emerged that trace the emergence and the evolution of Orientalism as an academic discipline, whilst other books have explored the politics of the Russian empire on its borderlands and how it interacted with its various eastern and Muslim peoples. Others have gone on to discuss more popular representations of the East in Russian imagination as well as of Russia in Central Asian imagination. So, scholars have addressed both kinds of questions. Interestingly enough however, these works often emphasize the lack of scholarly engagement with Russian political goals and the directives of the state itself. So instead, studies focusing on the academic discipline, have emphasized the purely scholarly motivations of many of the researchers and academics as if to say Russian Orientalists were very different from the kinds of Orientalists described by Said who were midwives of empire. There is also a large debate going on about whether or not Russia completely defies the Orient-Occident divide that was posited and theorized by Edward Said. But while Said's European models cannot obviously be seamlessly applied to their Tsarist Empire, much less to the Soviet Union, visual representations of the east suggest that his arguments might, be in some ways, more appropriate than scholars had initially imagined.

Art historians have pointed to the important correlations between late nineteenth century representations of Central Asia by Russian authors and of other parts of the Orient by European Romantic painters. While Russian conquests of the new eastern borderlands from the late eighteenth century onwards, which included Catherine the Great's expansion into Crimea and the Caucasus, brought many poor Slavic migrants into these regions, it was actually with St. Petersburg's increased hold over the three Asian states of Kokand, Bukhara, and Khiva under Alexander II in the second half of the nineteenth century that images of the Orient really started to proliferate in Russian scholarship, travel literature, and art. During this period, many Russian intellectuals and artists served in the Tsarist ventures from Poland to the Caucasus, similar to the artists who had accompanied Napoleon's expedition to Egypt, such as Jean-Leon Gerome. Artists also accompanied Russian military expeditions to Central Asia where they believed the collective task was to use European concepts of progress to restore the distant former cradles of civilization to their former glory. The most prominent of these artists was Vasily Vereshchagin. In 1867, Vereshchagin accompanied the Russian general Konstantin von Kauffmann's expedition to Turkestan, where the artist set out to produce a systematic record of events and the conquest of the territories by the Romanovs. Influenced by historical Romanticism, Vereshchagin and other such artists documented Russian imperial conquests and conquered territories, landmarks, and peoples.

(So you can see here that there is a focus on architecture and design and often not the local people. You can see in the left picture that it is the building that is the most prominently pictured thing in the frame, not the people on the side. And then when Vereshchagin did represent people in his images, they often contrasted grandeur and poverty, beauty and cruelty, and documented the slog of resistance and subjugation. On the right we see a politician's opium den, so easterners are portrayed as being under a narcotic influence; they're decadent, corrupt, not fit for self-government and rule. As one historian of Russian Orientalism David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye has argued, these paintings justified Russia's mission into Central Asia by invoking Orientalist tropes about despotism and cruelty following glory and vice.)

This Turkestan series was exhibited in St. Petersburg under the title 'The Barbarians', where it garnered generally good reviews in the press as well as a lot of enthusiastic praise by the artists. But while the Tsar's attitude towards Vereshchagin's Turkestan series is unclear, some of the paintings did manage to offend a number of the senior Russian military officials, because many of the battle scenes portrayed Russia's Central Asian campaign in a distinctly inglorious light. Here is a painting of an unexpected attack on the Russian army; and this painting is entitled After Good Luck (1868) where we see a Russian severed head held by the enemy. This one is called The Apotheosis of War (1871); as we can see, he is focusing a lot on the violence and cruelty of what is happening.)

In the first few decades of the twentieth century, another set of representations of the east was produced by a generation of artists such as Nikolai Karakhan, Alexander Nikolayev, Victor Ufimtsev, and others who spent significantly more time in Russia's Southern Orient than Vereshchagin did and had much more contact with the local people. This group formed around the painter Alexander Volkov, who was a Russian artist, born and raised in the Fergana Region, which is a region near Tashkent in Uzbekistan today, and who travelled to study art in St. Petersburg and then returned to Turkestan in 1916 where he painted for the remainder of his life. Certain members of his "group" or his immediate artists' collective even converted to Islam and changed their Russian names. For example, one artist, Alexander Nikolayev, changed his name to Usto-Mumin when he converted to Islam. Here is an example of one of his paintings.

When compared to the earlier nineteenth century Romantic Orientalist painters, these artists' styles highlight a few important differences. I think their experimental styles were influenced by Symbolist painters, such as Gauguin; by Impressionists and Cubists; by Malevich who was actually Nikolayev's first teacher; and also by church stained-glass windows and miniature painting. Art historians have described the style as Post-Impressionistic and Neo-Primitivist. So, like the activists of Baku that I started talking about, these artists were also increasingly inspired by the Revolutionary politics of the time, which had led to what was really a civil war that had been raging in this area since 1917. But, I think these revolutionary politics affected their choice of subject, which no longer consisted of static, mosaic-like scenes emphasizing embroidered patterns, opium addicts, and other types of decadent barbarism. Instead, artists like Nikolay Karakhan, one of Volkov's students who was originally from the Caucasus but then had permanently relocated to Turkestan, engaged directly in the Socialist experiment by producing Bolshevik propaganda. (Here is an example of a poster Karakhan made called Rewarding Shock Workers (1934). Shock workers were workers that managed to out-produce whatever norms the Socialist Government and the foreign collectives had set.

(This painting actually comes from a book called Sovetskii Vostok of Posters of the Soviet East, which you can find being sold on display in the Marker area upstairs here.)

Karakhan had studied in Turkestan in Tashkent between 1919 and 1921 at the height of the Civil War, and he was also a member of the Tashkent Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia, a group that gained favour as the legitimate bearers of the Communist ideal in the world of art at the time. So, even his paintings that were not actually propaganda posters tended to emphasize the accomplishments of the Bolshevik Revolution by turning Central Asian eastern peoples into active participants and producers of their own history. Here, for example, we can see an Uzbek person as the artist himself. He is in the centre of the composition and he is exercising agency to create a new symbol of the future republic. He is actually busy inscribing the new coat of arms of the Uzbek Republic writing a sentence in Uzbek in Arabic script, the translation of which is 'Long Live Uzbekistan'. Light seems to emanate from the Soviet symbol, highlighting the bright colours of his beautiful robe, while the older generation, including what looks like a woman in the background, remain shrouded in darkness.

So, is this new art Orientalist? As I mentioned earlier, there is this debate about whether or not the term Orientalism is at all appropriate for discussing events in the Russian and later Soviet context. Indeed, we can clearly see from the subjects chosen by these new Central Asian avant-garde artists, that they are very different from the nineteenth century Romantic representations of the east. (Here is another example of a painting by Karakhan, which is not really quite Socialist Realist yet but is moving in that direction.) However, it is important to note that, whereas the nineteenth century artists like Vereshchagin took great care to document the violence that accompanied Russian imperial conquests of Central Asia, these masters of the new Orient, as they called themselves, tended to completely ignore the Civil War and the violence raging all around them. In so doing, just like the political activists at Baku, they omitted the more violent dimensions of Soviet power in the East and supported its more constructive and productive narratives, thereby continuing to serve the interests of a new nominally anti-imperial and nominally anti-colonial state. Thank you very much.

Shumon: Thank you so much Masha. Purely for reasons of time, we are going to have to keep it moving so thank you very much. We will bring up our next guest in a moment.