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Call for Art Works - Imagined Futures: Transit Corridors in High Mountain Asia

The new Silk Roads seek to revive the ancient Silk routes from China to numerous regions through land and sea corridors for the development of trade and economy. Evoking old imaginaries of caravans and new imaginaries of smooth connections, the new silk roads speak to people’s hopes and fears.

And yet, these routes traverse challenging geographic terrains including the High Mountains of Asia. Mountains that seem impenetrable due to their harsh climate and extreme terrain. And yet across which tendrils of connections spread and the region has a rich culture of movement and migration primarily reliant upon pastoralist knowledge of the landscape. Hence, when imagining the new Silk Road, these mountain communities and their repositories of knowledge and heritage cannot be ignored. Among apparently isolated communities are traditions of cultural exchange as well as channels for economic and political exchange.

In this traveling exhibition, we wish to revisit the mountain communities residing alongside new transit corridors (BRI) to explore their knowledge and imagination of a changing landscape. We seek stories of engagement, survival, resilience and perseverance of living in mountain regions, otherwise known as ‘remote’ yet connected through a network of highways. We are particularly interested in works by artists and other individuals or groups that have worked with mountain communities to protect and promote their heritage, help voice their concerns, or spent time in these geographic regions to better understand their hopes and challenges. Your idea/work could be as big as attending to the mountain landscape/communities or focused on a single story or artefact.

Submission

Submissions will be accepted in different formats (preferably digital) such as photo essay, visuals of art work, textile, music, moving image and film accompanied by 300 words description of the work, BW photograph and 100 words bio by 20th December 2021 to the following addresses, altyn.kapalova@ucentralasia.org and laajverd@gmail.com.

Selected works will be notified by first week of January 2022 which will be showcased in the in-person exhibitions at Bishkek, Dushanbe and Islamabad in the month of February 2022. The works will also be exhibited on our online platform.

About the organizer: This exhibition is organized by the GCRF Resilient Silk Route Heritage Network funded by the UKRI-GCRF, led by University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan, Durham University in the UK and Laajverd in Pakistan. This project aims to develop a network of artists, creative professionals and academicians working on, or interested in heritages of local communities along the Silk Road in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

For any questions or concerns, please contact altyn.kapalova@ucentralasia.org and laajverd@gmail.com.