“Outer space without a place”

Given the context of the Cold War and the extreme sensitivity of space technology, Baikonur was always managed and run exclusively from Moscow. According to an old anecdote, visitors to Cosmodrome Baikonur during Soviet times were prohibited from taking photographs due to the maximum-security regime. The culture of secrecy extended to visitors of the Museum of Cosmodrome (opened in 1965) at the launching pod, which displayed various authentic artefacts related to the history of space flights (Gruntman Reference Gruntman2019, 350–66; Medeuova and Sandybayeva Reference Medeuova and Sandybayeva2023, 76–102). The only exception where visitors were permitted and encouraged to take photographs was in front of the large painting hanging in one of the exposition halls, depicting the view of Red Square and the Kremlin. The story can be read as a metaphor for how the Kazakhstani context of the Cosmodrome Baikonur remained invisible in Moscow-centric narratives. Existing scholarship on the histories of the Soviet and, later, Russian spaceflight programs and astroculture often reproduces this pattern (James, Siddiqi 2011; Gerovitch Reference Gerovitch2014; Sivkov Reference Sivkov2019, 67–79). Only recently, emerging scholarship began to explore the complex relationship between Baikonur’s technological and infrastructural development and the reality of the hosting society and land (Medeuova, Sandybayeva Reference Medeuova and Sandybayeva2022, 41–56; Reference Medeuova and Sandybayeva2023, 76–102; Sandybayeva, Medeuov, Medeuova Reference Medeuova2024, 1–25; Kopack Reference Kopack2021, 96–112).

The cosmodrome construction and operation left a significant mark on Kazakhstani territory and local communities, as well as on their politics, environment, society, and culture. On the one hand, the decision to build a cosmodrome in Kazakhstan led to an influx of non-Kazakhs — a veritable army of workers, soldiers, engineers, and other space professionals had moved to Kazakhstan with their families. Due to the military sensitivity of the space program, the construction of the cosmodrome also entailed the heightened presence of Soviet army personnel on the republic’s territory. On the other hand, constructing a spaceport on Kazakh land facilitated the inclusion of Kazakhstan in the circulation of professional Soviet mobility. It led to the development of transport infrastructure and other facilities in Kazakhstani cities and towns for hosting a large number of space-related visitors, including cosmonauts travelling to Baikonur for launch or landing from their space missions on the Kazakh steppes. The cultural and societal impact of the Soviet space program on local residents and the Kazakh national imaginary has never been studied. How was Soviet cultural propaganda received and reinterpreted in the local context? How has the language and imagery of the Kazakh national culture evolved to accommodate its cosmic encounters? And how have these representations altered since the nation acquired sovereignty?

From the advent of Kazakhstan’s independence, the presence on its territory of one of the largest international spaceports facilitated the formation of its own national space program. In the words of the first President of the country, Nursultan Nazarbayev, the history of Kazakhstan’s independence, symbolically, began with the Kazakhstani engagement with outer space: “In anticipation of the collapse of the Soviet Union, in August 1991, the Baikonur Cosmodrome was declared the property of the Republic, while in October that same year the first Kazakh cosmonaut was sent into space, and the Declaration of Kazakhstan’s independence was adopted in December. In this way, our intention to become a national state was, it turns out, started earlier in space than on earth” (Nazarbayev Reference Nazarbayev2006, 309). The First Kazakh cosmonaut, Toktar Aubakirov, was hailed as a national hero, and his image-making became a matter of national policy. A State program for honouring Aubakirov was approved, according to which the cosmonaut was obliged to go on tour around the country as part of a delegation headed by one of the deputy prime ministers. He has often been referred to as the “Kazakh Gagarin,” who not only conquered the cosmos but also restored, by his flight, historical justice in relation to the Kazakh people, who had surrendered a part of their territory for a cosmodrome.

Over three decades of independence, Kazakhstan has developed multiple ambitious space initiatives, launched three satellites, signed numerous agreements on cooperation with smaller and bigger space powers, built new space facilities, and invested in support of space observatories and other research facilities inherited from the Soviet Union (Bekus and Medeuov Reference Bekus and Medeuov2023, 322–42). The country’s elites have employed outer space techno-politics in shaping the image of Kazakhstan as a global and technologically advanced state. References to outer space science and technology have regularly appeared in the symbolic politics of Kazakhstan, becoming one of the most important toolkits for projecting the state’s aspirations and future achievements (Bekus Reference Bekus2021, 352).

A long-lasting proximity of space infrastructure has had a significant social and cultural impact on the formation of Kazakhstani national cosmic imaginaries. One can trace multiple tangible effects of such coexistence — from the development of the cosmic tourism industry to civil society groups campaigning against soil pollution caused by failed launches of Proton M. Alongside the official tours offered by several Kazakhstani operators, there are also groups associated with so-called “dark tourism” led by “stalkers” who offer trips to various abandoned sites related to the space industry or, more broadly, with a space heritage tourism that frames the spaceport as an “authentic heritage attraction” shaped by the history of space flight (Tiberghien, Mukhamedjanova, and Xie Reference Tiberghien, Mukhamedjanova and Xie2023, 1445–64). Furthermore, numerous local museums across Kazakhstan tell their stories of cosmic encounters, often reiterating the Soviet narratives of space missions and using them to boost local patriotism. Indeed, all the major museums in the capital and many of the smaller local ethnographic museums across various regions of Kazakhstan contain exhibitions (or sections of them) dedicated to the space program. Larger museums in the regional centres, which position themselves as “space harbours” — Karaganda and Jezkazgan — hold collections of authentic space artefacts, including fragments of space waste, spacesuits, Gagarin’s training helmet, the door of the landing hatch of the SoyuzTMA-18M spacecraft, on which Aidyn Aimbetov went into space, etc. These museums offer insights into the manner in which the unofficial narratives of local encounters with space technology and its artefacts intersect with “cosmic cultural idealism” (Medeuova and Sandybayeva Reference Medeuova and Sandybayeva2022, 41–56; Bakytova and Medeuova Reference Bakytova and Medeuova2023, 151–86). Furthermore, Baikonur generates a spectrum of ideas that highlight the complexity of its transformative imprint on the natural and cultural landscape. On the one hand, we find a sense of being deprived of land, which came to be perceived as an “exclusion zone” from which surrounding communities were debarred (Bekus Reference Bekus and Siddiqi2025); categories of social alienation and natural disaster were often used (McGuire Reference McGuire, Sharipova, Bissenova and Burkhanov2024, 163). On the other hand, over the decades of its operation, Baikonur became imprinted upon and interwoven with multiple stories of local interaction with the cosmos as a physical reality. It came to serve as an emblem of philosophical ideas, transforming it into a constitutive element of the native landscape. The combination of such localised dimensions of space experience, in many ways unique for Kazakhstan, with the Soviet-style storytelling about cosmic achievements, constitutes an important part of the “space heritage” framework, which reflects enduring power asymmetries between the former Soviet and now Russian centre managing Baikonur and Kazakhstani reality on the ground (Tiberghien Reference Tiberghien2024).

Despite a long history of living close to Baikonur, the strict security regime prevailing in the Soviet period and reaffirmed since independence has meant that most citizens of Kazakhstan have limited access to the city of Baikonur or direct experience of the area’s adjustment to the cosmodrome. Though Kazakhs constitute 85 percent of Baikonur’s population, the city has been administered as a Russian enclave.Footnote ¹ Citizens of Kazakhstan, if not employed by any organisation in Baikonur or at the cosmodrome, can only travel to this city on commercial tours run by Russian or Kazakhstani tourist operators or if invited by the residents of Tyuratam station and Baikonur city. The land occupied by the Baikonur spaceport, together with the area surrounding Baikonur town that has been leased to the Russian Federation, is nine times larger in extent than Kazakhstan’s capital city, Astana, and it appears on the country’s map as a gigantic territory to which citizens are denied all access. It can be described as “a sacrifice zone,” a concept coined to capture a sense of the high price paid by communities or ecologies for industrial and developmental projects and their infrastructure (Chinigò and Walker Reference Chinigò and Walker2020, 391). It highlights the tension between the national and the international beneficiaries of projects in big, faraway metropoles. It reveals the disjuncture between the national and the local actors and their respective — and mutually incompatible — “shares” in the benefits. Over the years of independence, the involvement of the Kazakhstani authorities in managing and administering their citizens’ lives in Baikonur has gradually increased in various spheres — from the use of the Kazakh language in education to the circulation of Kazakhstani currency. The ambition to take over the cosmodrome completely, which had been occasionally expressed by Kazakhstani officials as a goal of state policy, however, has been met with disbelief by those who recognise the limited nature of Kazakhstani resources and their lack of capacity to achieve the goal in practice. Assessing how realistic the desire of Kazakhstani elites to become a fully-fledged space power is beyond the scope and focus of this article. These ideas, however, play an important role in shaping the nation’s cultural imaginaries of outer space and determining the forms of engagement with the cosmos. Examination of these ideas and their ramifications also helps us understand how the presence of a cosmodrome has affected the nation’s cultural and political development. The cosmodrome emerges at the intersection of conflicting perspectives — as a piece of critical infrastructure with the potential of placing the country on the global map of space modernity or an element of what scholars call a “residue asset” or an “imperial wreckage” that continues to undermine its sovereignty (Kopack Reference Kopack2021, 96–112; Cooley 2001, 100–27). In the former, the cosmodrome opens the possibility of variable reading of the Soviet past, potentially limiting the power of a trauma-driven postcolonial framework, interpreted by some scholars as a symptom of Kazakhstan’s postcolonial ambiguity (Kudaibergenova Reference Kudaibergenova2016, 917–35). In the latter, it can be placed alongside political repression, forced sedentarisation, and famine as one of the forms of expansion of external influences linked to modernization, which proved equally disruptive to the traditional Kazakh way of living (Sandybayeva, Medeuov, and Medeuova Reference Medeuova2024).

Cultural representations of outer space

The cosmodrome became a formative reference point for various cultural representations of cosmos, both those commissioned by state authorities and those contained in independent artists’ projections and critical reflections. The artworks in question provide important insights for understanding decentred, localized perceptions and attitudes towards outer space, and demonstrate how those cosmic imaginaries manifest themselves outside the Soviet and post-Soviet framework. In Tlostanova’s words, the artworks communicate their message by recreating a dynamic, if contradictory, dialogue between cosmological roots and contemporary conditions, between local histories and global designs, in the destinies of those who belong to the underside of modernity (Tlostanova Reference Tlostanova2018, 42). They contemplate their local or ethno-national concerns through the prism of contemporary global social and political processes. Artistic interpretations of outer space in Kazakhstan can be seen in this context as an important channel for communicating regional diversity in cosmic perceptions and attitudes and as a running commentary on the social, political, and economic conditions associated with the operation of a cosmodrome on Kazakhstani territory. Seen through the lens of the “entrance to the sky” metaphor, representations of the cosmodrome also become a vehicle for channelling ideas about the future and shaping national perspectives on the cosmos as a matter of physical experience and a philosophical idea amalgamated in Kazakh Futurism.

As Nicola Triscott (Reference Triscott, by and Dickens2016, 414) noted, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art and literature had a direct impact on the space exploration program of both the USA and the USSR nations up to the space race and the Apollo program. The notions of progress and the avant-garde ran across both modern art and space exploration, with the space program even drawing inspiration from those notions and that art. Cultural representations of space facilitate the spreading and promoting of scientific discoveries and aspirations, providing a vehicle for the broader public’s cosmic encounters (Smith et al. Reference Smith, Smith, Arcand, Smith and Bookbinder2015, 282–97). At the same time, the artists who work with cosmic themes often communicate their own experiences of interaction with outer space ideas; outer space thus emerges here not only as a set of historical facts or imaginations but also as a part of their reflection on living experience, as a part of their local history and native geography.

As this study demonstrates, the artistic cosmic imaginaries in Kazakhstan form a peculiar national realm of astroculture: the motifs of modernist idealism as a form of the “legacy attitude” inherited from Soviet times are often embedded in the nationalising mythologies grounded in local realities, national mythologies and history, or in a variety of everyday cosmic encounters that distinguish the Kazakhstani people’s experience of outer space due to proximity of Baikonur.

To trace the evolution of the contemporary artistic cosmic imaginaries in Kazakhstan, the article will first consider how Soviet cultural representations of outer space were modified and adapted in the context of the Soviet republics to appeal to those situated on the peripheries. It then examines how the depiction and interpretation of the cosmos were transformed in the era of independence. On the one hand, these representations appear to reiterate high modernist narratives of social progress, working to reconnect national culture with cosmic imaginaries. On the other hand, they reflect the emergence of a more critical approach to space, with environmental anxiety arising due to the potential harm caused by failed launches and proliferating concerns about the political and societal impact of the cosmodrome, operated as it is by a foreign state. In some cases, the occupation of the territory required for the operation of Baikonur has been compared to colonisation, with the Kazakhstani government being criticised for its inability to defend or pursue its own national interests when allowing the Russian Federation to stay on in Baikonur. One of the primary purposes fulfilled by the artistic imaginaries, however, is the aspiration they embody to delineate a nationalising perspective on the future, for which outer space remains the most apt means of representation.

Charting the national realm within the Soviet astroculture

Existing scholarship on cultural representations of Soviet outer space focuses on the pan-Soviet context, implicitly interpreting the Soviet Union as a homogenous territory with its citizenry evenly submitted to ideology and propaganda. The successes in space were widely covered in the Soviet media and generated what could be called a “Soviet space culture” that sustained public excitement and created a sense of shared belonging and involvement in cosmic ventures. These cultural representations combined cosmic enthusiasm and dreams of humanity’s celestial future with the idea of space techno-science as evidence for and a symbol of Soviet modernity and its progressive trajectory (Siddiqi 2010, 431). Rarely, however, did these interpretations of Soviet space culture take into consideration the national and cultural diversity of the Soviet state, with significant disparities between the centre and the peripheries, or between different republics. As Anna Eremeeva noted in her analysis of the regional dimension of outer space propaganda, by the 1980s, the Soviet cosmos was often involved in the production of specific practices of localised patriotism through the creation of space-related “sites of memory” and of local pantheons of space heroes (Eremeeva 2011, 139). In Kazakhstan, the repertoire of such practices was particularly rich. The physical proximity of the cosmodrome opened up endless opportunities for local communities to encounter the cosmos, occasions serving to bridge the gap between ideological narratives of Soviet space and the local context. This local perspective in cosmic art could be detected already in the Soviet artistic representations, driven as they were by a mixture of utopian ideas of a bright future with patriotic sentiments (Kohonen Reference Kohonen2009, 99). Several Kazakhstani artists of the so-called “Soviet generation,” that is, those who had lived and worked in Kazakhstan before 1991, deployed cosmic themes, contributing their visions to the broader domain of Soviet space art.

Alexei Stepanov (1923–1989), based in Almaty, was among the first artists to embark upon his imaginative exploration of outer space in the early 1960s. Stepanov considered himself to be a pioneer, mapping the as-yet uncharted contours of Soviet space art that followed the technological advancement of humanity. In his own words, the cosmos opened up “great opportunities for the artists to follow the technology that has overtaken the century with the power of its imagination” (“Kosmos v zhivopisi sovetskikh khudozhnikov” 2017).Footnote ² His fascination with the cosmos is conveyed through various assemblages that combine the elements of cosmic imagery, that is, rockets, stars, and cosmonauts. Being largely philosophical and universalist, these ideas have often been underpinned for Kazakhstani artists like Stepanov by their own individual encounters with outer space operations. For example, he recollected how his interest in the cosmos was inspired by the Sputnik launch, which he witnessed when travelling in the steppe. While having a broad pan-Soviet and even global appeal, the launch of the first satellite, in Stepanov’s perception, became symbolically connected with the site upon which it occurred: “The first space launch from Kazakhstani soil deeply excited me. There was something special about the fact that the ancient land of nomads became the launching pad for our scouts of the Universe” (Anisimov Reference Anisimov2013). Stepanov’s painting “Human from the Planet Earth” (1969) featured in an exhibition of works by Soviet and American artists in 1975, commemorating the joint Soyuz and Apollo mission as a part of the program of the Union of Artists of the USSR, which supported artwork on cosmic themes similar to the NASA Art Program (Boczkowska Reference Boczkowska2016, 229). Due to his dedication to the cosmos, Stepanov was among the first Soviet artists invited to visit Baikonur in 1977, where he was able to observe the launch of Soyuz-25, spend some time with cosmonauts, and complete a series of paintings that were presented to the public at his solo exhibition, which opened in Baikonur the same year.

Another key personality of that era, Kamil Mullashev (born 1944), often interwove philosophical ideas of time and outer space with local manifestations of Kazakh life and culture. Cosmonauts, space-related objects, and pieces of space infrastructure appear in his paintings as features of the new Kazakh landscape. Several paintings of the late Soviet period combine the open steppe and its grazing horses — referencing Kazakhs’ nomadic tradition — with an element associated with the cosmos, such as a cosmonaut, parachutes, or a dish-shaped satellite antenna.

Nomadism as a tradition embedded in the national identity acquired symbolic importance after Kazakhstan gained independence in 1991 (Khalid Reference Khalid2007), and its two most emblematic features are the horse, whose domestication made the development of extensive mounted pastoral nomadism possible, and the yurt, considered to be the perfect nomadic dwelling due to its transportability and comfort. As Carole Ferret observes, this symbolism did have roots in the Soviet era: during the Soviet policy of sedentarisation promoted as a form of modernization, the Kazakhs’ nomadic pastoral system was destroyed, yet without there being a complete eradication of nomadism; it was turned into folklore instead, becoming a cultural heritage of the modern Kazakhstani people (Ferret Reference Ferret2016, 182). In some paintings, joint references to the Virgin Land campaign and to space exploration — two major developments that shaped the Kazakhstani experience of the second half of the twentieth-century modernization — are combined with references to nomadic heritage (“Horizons of the Virgin Land” 1980; “Youth” 1974). As will be shown later, this prominence of the physical localisation and cultural conditioning in Mullashev’s vision of space theme opened the opportunity for interpreting his works in the post-independence era, when they were displayed at the Kazakh National pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. In his “The Earth and the Time. Kazakhstan” (1978), Mullashev depicts the cosmonaut contrasted with the vast steppe with tiny horses in the far distance and the vast sky symbolised by a bright and shiny parachute. A similar reference to the combined modernising impact of the Virgin Land campaign and the space exploration launched from the Kazakhstani land appears in the painting “Over the Planet of Virgin Land” by Mikhail Antoniuk (1977), featuring, in an expressionist manner, the fusion of the wheat spikes and space rocket launch flames.

The importance of the cosmodrome being sited on Kazakhstani territory and the embedding of it in the cultural context of Kazakhstani tradition can also be seen in the work of Evgenii Sidorkin (1930–1982), a graphic artist from Almaty. His work “On the Kazakh Land. Baikonur” (1981) depicts three cosmonauts in weightless circular motion and connected, as if by an umbilical cord, to one another. Sidorkin’s interest in Kazakh folk culture and tradition is projected onto his imaginings of the cosmos, with the figures of the cosmonauts being juxtaposed with the stone sculptures known as balbal , one of the key elements of the Kazakhstani cultural heritage. The balbal are anthropomorphic stelae, cut from stone and installed on the steppes of Kazakhstan. The head of the ancient goddess Umai, personifying the female, earthly origin, and fertility itself, is a solar deity, appearing in the centre of the circle formed by cosmonauts. The general composition connects the ancient history of nomads and modernity by way of the cosmos, using the notion of the “umbilical cord,” which places the cosmic centre of Earth on Kazakh land (Medeuova and Sandybayeva Reference Medeuova and Sandybayeva2023).

In the final decade of the Soviet era, the revival of national traditions and a new sensitivity to the risk of ideas and symbols of the past being overwhelmed by the future-oriented worship of science and technological modernisation, epitomised by the cosmos, entered the mainstream cultural and political discourses. Cosmonauts remain one of the recurrent elements in the various artistic reflections integrated into the artists’ complex system of references and symbols. The painting “A Poem about Immortality. Triptych” (1985) by Amandos Akanayev is based on ideas formulated in the book “Az and I” by Kazakh writer and poet Olzhas Suleimenov, published a decade earlier. The book was banned in the Soviet Union for expressing what the Soviet censors saw as an inappropriate nationalist deviation in its views on history. With the onset of perestroika, Suleimenov’s ideas came to be more warmly welcomed by the late Soviet political elites and indeed by the broader public. In the abovementioned painting “A Poem about Immortality,” Akanayev depicted the poet Suleimenov as surrounded by fragments of the history of the twentieth century. The visual narrative is divided into three different sections summarising both dark and bright pages of the past. The left-hand panel refers to the tragic events of WWII, representing soldiers and suffering mothers losing their children in war. The right-hand panel of the triptych depicts the artist’s contemporary reality — a happy mother with a child is portrayed next to a cosmonaut floating above the Earth and horses galloping far below — pointing towards the Kazakh land with grazing horses, one of the key recurrent elements symbolising Kazakh tradition. It is worth noting that Suleimenov became famous for his poem “Earth, bow down to the man!” which he wrote just before Yuri Gagarin’s first space flight. On the actual day of the flight, April 12, 1961, leaflets featuring the poem were scattered by helicopters across Kazakhstani cities; this action was designed to establish a connection between the Soviet achievement in space and the voice of the Kazakhstani poet, bridging them in the perception of the Kazakh people.

A similar reference to the metaphorical power of the figure of the cosmonaut can be found in the painting “Artist’s Dream” (1983) by Bekseit Tulkiev. It brings together multiple stories, featuring a varied cast, including the cosmonaut, this time as a child in a spacesuit representing the reality of an optimistic future, and a woman covering her face, representing the Kazakh figure of the daughter-in-law and thereby calling to mind complex connotations of the traditional culture and its restrictive societal order. The image of the child cosmonaut suggests that humankind is at the beginning of its space exploration, with a long way still ahead. The national references have been deployed here as recognisable tropes to convey a universalistic message, thus serving as a bridge between tradition’s past and future, linking local conditions to the global reality of modernization.

The reading of these works in the era of post-Soviet Kazakhstani development remains polarised, reflecting the wider historiographical debate over interpretations of how the Soviet and national frameworks of societal development interrelated in Central Asia. On one side of this discussion is the argument about Soviet modernization, which aspired to reform and advance national identities, drawing on an evolutionary approach to the concept. Scholars subscribing to this sometimes labelled the “post-revisionist” approach explore how the Soviet project, which combined soft-line ideological policies in culture, education, and the promotion of modernity, sought to advance mass education in indigenous languages, fight illiteracy, improve public health, emancipate women, and promote political (ideological) mobilisation, thus shaping the national being (Kalinovsky Reference Kalinovsky2018; Kamp Reference Kamp2006; Abashin Reference Abashin2015). Discussing the active involvement of local actors in implementing Soviet policies further suggests a more complex understanding of the Soviet project, one that is not entirely ideologically antagonistic to locals/nationals (Khalid Reference Khalid2021; Kindler Reference Kindler2018). It is in this interpretative framework that cultural discourses and practices associated with the promotion of outer space can also be seen as seeking to accommodate diverse ethnic groups and nations in their shared pursuit of the cosmic aspirations of socialist modernity. On the other pole of this ‘Soviet versus national’ debate are the proponents of rigid division between the ethno-national and Soviet, who consider the Soviet modernization project as an intentionally destructive and aiming at the erasure of the pre-existing forms of nations’ collective being, thus rendering it as external and hostile towards the ethnic cultures, driven by violence and exclusions (Kassymbekova and Chokobaeva Reference Kassymbekova and Chokobaeva2021, Cameron 2018). The goal of the national revival, in this logic, implies the recovery of culture and tradition from the age “before” and “outside of the framework” of modernization, which can be attained through a consistent othering of experiences and meanings tainted by interaction with Soviet ideology and practices. On the one hand, this interpretative strategy can produce important insights into previously invisible spaces of resistance and the discriminatory effects of modernization, allowing formerly silenced voices to be expressed and researched, and creating a more socially inclusive and culturally and politically sensitive interpretation of the past. On the other hand, sanctioning this strategy as the sole legitimate lens of understanding Soviet history often produces the opposite of what it promises to achieve. Rather than opening the meaning of the complex processes and experiences of the past to new analyses, it seeks to stabilise and affix their meaning, embedded in old hierarchies and structural oppositions of the bygone era. When applied to the visual language of works by Stepanov, Mullashev, Sidorkin, Tulkiev, and other Kazakhstani artists of the Soviet era, this strategy of cultural binarism yields their reading through the lens of glaring antagonisms between technology-driven future-oriented Soviet modernity and national tropes of empty landscapes, nomadic culture, and other cultural symbols that are traditional and, thus, implicitly antimodern. To highlight the stark opposition between national (traditional) and Soviet (modern) Aliya Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen labelled this strategy of visual representation as “Soviet orientalism” (Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen Reference Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen2016, 220). ‘The national traditions’, however, are never permanently fixed, as they evolve and absorb the effects and shocks of societal changes. Within the Soviet project, the Kazakh national tradition underwent a significant transformation, and various elements of what is today perceived as “canon” were created in the contradictory process in which, as Alima Bissenova puts it, the authentic and constructed, the living and the ideological, co-existed side by side (Bissenova Reference Bissenova and Bissenova2025 12). The cultural and political context of national independence opened new perspectives and approaches to the Soviet past, in which the meaning of the visual language of cosmic art and the ways it engaged with the national becomes open to reinvention. The inclusion of works by Kamil Mullashev in the exposition of the Kazakhstani Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, alongside artworks of the twenty-first century, as will be discussed below, attests to the attempt to offer new readings of Soviet cosmic culture produced in Kazakhstan within the newly shaped continuum of the Kazakh national tradition.

Cosmic culture in the era of independence

After 1991, with the advent of independence, space remains a key reference point for reflections on Kazakhstani culture, history, identity, politics, and society. Cosmic cultural representations have now become interwoven with the nationalising process, its search for means to revise linguistic and cultural hierarchies, re-label the nation’s cultural space, and form a new imaginary of the self and the place of Kazakhstan in the global world (Bissenova Reference Bissenova and Bissenova2023, 13). Contemporary art plays a crucial role in this context, as it provides a vehicle for re-examining the conditions of national being and contributes to public debates on the Soviet legacy and its traumas while charting new conceptual approaches to them (Kudaibergenova Reference Kudaibergenova2020). In this novel recasting, cosmic enthusiasm intertwines with the social utopianism of a bygone era, being redeveloped into a more critical interpretation of outer space and its place in Kazakhstani society and culture. Cosmos in artistic imaginaries continues to serve as a powerful metaphor for thinking about the future, but its functionality has now broadened. It also helps to liberate the nation from the Soviet preoccupation with the universalistic ideas of the future by which it had once been bewitched. Cosmos in the guise of artworks now helps to revive culture and tradition inherited from the past and serves as a tool for critical reflection on the present. The general context of these works can be seen as an example of ‘interpolation’, which, according to Bill Ashcroft (Reference Ashcroft2001), constitutes an important strategy of post-colonial transformation and can be traced in many other similar forms of post-dominance cultural and societal makeover. This strategy involves a process of appropriation and utilisation of discursive systems in order to reorient discourses so that they may “bear the burden” of expressing new experiences (Ashcroft Reference Ashcroft2001, 32, 112). New readings of cosmic imaginaries in Kazakh culture demonstrate a combination of such interpolation through the re-appropriation of and engagement with forms of representation of outer space that allow the ‘repackaging’ of the metaphors that had existed in the previous Soviet system. A process of this kind can also be seen as a form of mimetic resistance (Oushakine Reference Oushakine2018).

Sergey Maslov (1952–2002) was one of the major personalities of the Kazakh contemporary art scene in the 1990s, who found himself at the forefront of the new avant-garde culture. He developed his own mythology in the course of that decade, using various artistic media - installation, performance, video, and painting to merge the theme of cosmos and futurism with Kazakh culture. His approach to reality often combined irony and criticism to highlight the world’s inconsistencies and brokenness (Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen Reference Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen2016, 250). One of his unfinished projects was the installation “Baikonur-2,” which was later completed using the artist’s original sketches. Maslov developed a futuristic story about “outer space nomads” in his work, illustrated by a series of digital artworks. Photographs of Kazakh people dressed in traditional garments and living in yurts, tents emblematic of traditional Kazakh nomadism, have been placed in cosmic landscapes, changing both the reality of the cosmos and that of Kazakh national life. This remix of national symbols with cosmic imagery climaxed in the work “Baikonur 2,” which transforms a yurt into a space rocket. Multiple layers of these provocative juxtapositions leave their meaning open to continual interpretations. The artist, who combined a characteristic feature of what Viktor Miziano called the “artist-mythmaker” and “artist-trickster,” engaged in the process of magic historicism, which allowed one to dive into history through references to symbols as a form of resistance and a way of reconnecting with a new reality (Misiano Reference Misiano2012, 23). Emerging at the moment of liberation from the censorship and ideological pressure of the Soviet system in the 1990s, Maslov’s work represents a paradoxical form of the post-Soviet fusion, in which the recent past, with its cosmic signifiers, is not ignored as a “black hole” of national being, but is integrated into the new hybrid reality.

In many artworks of the new era, the cosmos emerges not as an abstract phenomenon but as the realm implicated in a range of human activities, both in the sky and on Earth. Said Atabekov, a member of Kazakhstan’s first avant-garde art group, “Kyzyl Tractor,” expressed his fascination with the observatory that existed in Samarkand (now Uzbekistan) in the fifteenth centuryFootnote ³ in the art performance “Observatory of the Destitute” (1994). Together with a group of other artists, Atabekov lived for two months in the desert of the “Ordabasy” reserve to bring into focus the experience of the economic crisis in the country, redirecting the “observatory” mission from the sky to the earthly concerns of people. The action was a critical response to the city’s social problems, where, for several years, people lived without light and gas and lit fires in the streets. Said Atabekov’s cosmos appears to operate as an overarching metaphor that can be applied to decrypt the complexity of various objects, from yurts to traditional rugs with their sophisticated ornamentation.Footnote ⁴ Essentially, “cosmic” in this context refers to a different type of temporality, going beyond the framework of Soviet or post-Soviet technological space endeavors and, instead, referring to the engagement with the universe that has characterised human life since ancient times. Said Atabekov highlights for Kazakhstan the combining of the philosophical with, indeed, the sacred dimension of the cosmos by interpreting the Baikonur area as ‘the umbilical cord of the earth” in his project “Baiterek” (2014), which transforms this observation tower in Astana, a symbol of the country’s independence, into a rocket.Footnote ⁵

A fascination with the story of Ulugh Beg the astronomer as a nodal point in Central Asia’s history of engagement with sky observation can also be seen in the multimedia installation ‘Ulugh Beg: Futuristic Machine of Central Asia’ by Kazakhstani artist Almagul Menlibayeva, displayed at the Lahore Biennale 2 in 2020 (Menlibayeva Reference Menlibayeva2020). The artist deploys the history of the observatory to insist on the need to reconsider the role of scientific progress in the broader Central Asian heritage, connecting an earlier intersection of power and science in history with that of the present. In a different work, “Ulugh Beg’s Capsule,” the artist reflects on the difference between the attitude towards space and the stars in Ulugh Beg’s time and the way we see it today as a post-industrial society. The connection between space and power appears now even more pronounced: access to space ensured by space technologies, like satellite communications, translates into the ability to control and underpin the status of those in power.

For many artists, the siting of Baikonur on Kazakh land represents a way to foster the uniqueness of Kazakh national life, as shown in the painting by Nurbek Zhardemov, “The Kazakh Wedding on Mars” (2020). The work in question, which is all of five meters long, interprets the existence of Baikonur and closeness to the cosmos as a feature distinguishing the Kazakh people among nations — and this perspective is conveyed in the painting through the placing of a traditional wedding celebration (“toy”) against a Martian landscape.Footnote ⁶ A linking of the essence of Kazakh national culture and tradition to a futuristic context and themes is achieved by appropriating the cosmodrome as an integral part of national history. A much more critical awareness of the consequences of space development and a far more profound reflection on outer space as a metaphor for modernization, leading to a disruption of the traditional way of life and disconnection from tradition, is displayed in the works of Armina Tauken. Consider, for example, the painting of her featuring the launch of a space rocket with its lower parts pictured as tree roots ripped out of the ground at the moment of take-off.

The other side of this modernization process — the emancipation of women — was captured in a work by Askhat Akhmediarov, “Rocket Booster” (2019), first displayed at the exhibition “Ayan” (a Kazakh word, which can be translated as “Revelation”) in Astana. In the painting, the artist reflects on the changing social roles of Kazakh women, changes that he had himself witnessed. Akhmediarov brings into play his childhood memories impacted by the proximity of cosmos routines:

The surrealistic painting depicts Kazakh women dressed in the traditional headdress of the bride, which looks like a rocket. In his comments, the artist compared the changes in women’s public roles and the obstacles they face to those encountered by a rocket that overcomes gravity at launch. However, the traditional headdress of the bride, which at first glance resembles a rocket, leaves part of the female experience under the spell of the old patriarchal view of women.Footnote ⁷

A different and more disparaging perspective on the role of the cosmos in Kazakh people’s lives, one that sets aside the romanticism of national cosmic imaginaries and brings forward a social critique of the reality surrounding space travel on Earth, can be seen in the works of Rashid Nurekeev, who was born and brought up in the area adjacent to Baikonur, in the district centre of Zhosaly55. His perception of the cosmodrome is not mediated by press or TV images, but constitutes a material reality inscribed in everyday life. Nurekeev recalls how his grandmother, who by virtue of family connections had permission to visit the gated territory of Baikonur, used to take him on trips there:

In Rashid’s attitude, there are no traces of the admiration for outer space typical of the “officially” sanctioned visual representations. In his life, the cosmos and the cosmodrome are associated with endless fences, barriers, and incomprehensible activities behind them. This attitude is presented in a mixed-media collage, “01,” featuring a cosmonaut in a spacesuit with an amputated leg painted in bright acrylic colours. The cosmonaut is leaning on a broken plywood snow shovel as a crutch; the front wheel and handlebars of an ordinary bicycle are drawn nearby, and in the upper part of the space depicted as a blue background with a slight white glare, “01” is printed in a clear font. The painting with the one-legged cosmonaut was the centerpiece of a solo exhibition (2020) by the artist in Astana. It can be read as a critique of Kazakhstani official space policy, which often declares unachievable goals. It highlights the contrast between the authorities’ technopolitical aspirations in outer space with the reality on the ground, where the more urgent real-life problems of ordinary Kazakh people have yet to be solved; or as a pointer towards the shortcomings of the national technoscientific development, which is incapable of achieving the declared goals without reliance on the major space powers.

Overall, the cosmos in the artistic imaginary often operates as a critical lens, serving as a polyvalent metaphor for various different themes. It can, for example, be deployed to reflect on the “colonial” nature of the cosmodrome’s presence in Kazakhstan, or it can foster a new identity for a country altering through its engagement in global processes; it can symbolise the old Soviet order as a combination of both nostalgia and trauma. Such an intersection of cosmic themes with reflections on the country’s political programs and cultural traditions, merging nomadism and escapism, can be found in the works of Anvar Musrepov. The Soviet use of the cosmos had appeared to be a part of the political promises they were making, best described as a form of escapism. Hence, in the work “Dzhigitovka” (the name for the traditional art of daring trick riding on horseback, demonstrating the rider’s skill and courage), Musrepov depicts his running away to the cosmos, a realm in an imaginary ideal space:

Cosmos thus becomes a signifier for what is unreal as a part of accessible physical reality but shapes the horizon of potentials and expectations.

In 2019, Anvar Musrepov curated the exhibition of young artists “First Contact,” where outer space was a cross-cutting theme employed to address the questions posed by Kazakh national identity, which cannot be defined without considering the transformations and changes that society has undergone and that affect how people describe themselves:

Anvar Musrepov also co-curated the Kazakh pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale 2024, entitled “Jerūiyq: Journey Beyond the Horizon.”Footnote ¹¹ The exhibition offered a strategy for integrating futuristic thinking generated during the Soviet and post-Soviet eras into a chronological line. In his words, the selection of works by artists from different generations made it possible to showcase the evolution of artistic imaginaries on the themes of decolonial futurism, utopia, and cosmism and to demonstrate the enduring presence of these themes in Kazakh art. The artworks shown in Venice, indeed, represented several different epochs — from work by Kamil Mullashev, “The Earth and Time. Kazakhstan” (1978), to the installation “Baikonur 2,” converting a yurt into a space rocket, by the abovementioned conceptual artist from the 1990s, Sergei Maslov, to the young contemporary artists working in various digital art media, Lena Pozdnyakova, Eldar Tagi, and Anvar Musrepov among them. Drawing on the legacy of Maslov, who had “sent” authentic yurts into outer space, Anvar Musrepov develops this synthesis in a multi-media project showing yurts as robotic creatures of the future. Despite the clear links and similar references, cosmic allusions in Muserpov’s work emerge as less romanticized and idealized but more practical and real. As a result, the exhibition at the Venice Biennale produced a multilayered and multi-media narrative, building connections between different generations of artists. Brought together in a collective exposition, they display a mosaic of cultural representations of outer space and assert the existence of the Kazakh tradition of engagement with the cosmos and utopia as a domain within the national cultural landscape. In the nomadic worldview, the central theme of the pavilion, Jerūiyq , is not only the concept of a promised land, but also the recognition that it can only be good where you love something on this earth. If you love it, it’s your eternal world, and if you don’t, it’s just another utopia (Medeuova Reference Medeuova2024).

The conception of the Kazakhstani pavilion as an attempt to build a multi-generational trajectory of space art has been criticised for its willingness to embrace and accommodate Soviet cosmic representations localized in the Kazakhstani context, both geographically and culturally, thus seemingly reproducing the former hierarchies and patterns of representation.Footnote ¹² A closer look at the interaction with the Soviet cosmic past displayed in Venice, however, reveals a more complex strategy of reworking the past and reimagining the Kazakh tradition while repurposing the local and ethnic component of the Soviet visuality. They form what Homi Bhabha defined as “a third space,” an interstice of hybridity, which makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process (Bhabha Reference Bhabha1994, 55–6), and in which different elements of pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet culture can be reinvented so that they can contribute to the cultural design of the present and future. The introduction of a new system of references for the evolution of the Kazakh cosmic imaginary becomes an indication of such reformulation.

The ultimate goal of Venice Pavilion’s exhibition on Kazakh-futurism is to chart the prospects of Kazakh-futurism as an important dimension of becoming a nation, placing it in the context of “the futures of others” alongside phenomena such as Afrofuturism and Sinofuturism that challenge the status quo and the hegemony of Eurocentrism in envisioning the future through alternatives (Dery Reference Dery and Dery1994; Musrepov 2024; Musrepov 2024). Afrofuturism developed as a theory and an influential aesthetic and platform for rewriting new narratives of the past and future to attune to the nuances and sensitivities of Black cultural identity, combining the legacy of ancient African civilisations with the hard-wrought, preserved knowledge and the art that points towards a different future (Stuart Reference Stuart and Kevin2023, 12). Kazakho-futurism, in this context, implies charting a new trajectory for the evolution of Kazakh cultural identity, retracing its origins both within and outside the Soviet past, and asserting the Kazakh’s entitlement to “own vision of future” (Medeuova Reference Medeuova2024). Futurism, according to Anvar Musrepov, can be used by conceptual artists as an instrument for placing “Kazakho-futurism” on the map of co-existing decolonial futurisms (Musrepov Reference Musrepov and Bissenova2025).