Talas Kept My Shadow is a single-channel video and immersive installation that traces the lingering presence of the Soviet past across Central Asia. Through sound, image, and spatial design, it reflects on inherited memory, fractured identity, and the silent weight of the remnants of a Janus-faced empire.
Project Video
Abstract
Talas Kept My Shadow is a single-channel video and immersive installation that interrogates the lingering influence of Soviet imperialism in post-Soviet Central Asia. Filmed at the Kirov Dam, located at the Kyrgyz-Kazakh border where the largest Lenin’s head in the world looks over the Talas River —the project uses spatial media to explore how the remnants of empire continue to shape landscape, identity, and memory.
This work positions the dam as both a literal and metaphorical site: an enduring structure built during the height of Soviet expansionism and a symbol of how colonial ideologies persist long after political regimes dissolve. The installation does not attempt to reconstruct history through linear narrative. Instead, it offers a sensory archive—an assemblage of image, sound, and space that reflects on fragmented memory, inherited trauma, and the ambient presence of power.
The exhibition space is designed as a narrow corridor composed of semi-translucent fabric panels onto which site-specific footage is projected. These layered visuals blur as viewers move through them, creating an experience where clarity is always partial and memory always shifting. This spatial progression mimics the act of walking through time: the further one travels, the more obscured the past becomes. A custom audio composition combines environmental field recordings from the dam’s surroundings—wind, birds, and ambient steppe soundscape—with an abstract, visceral score that emphasizes the psychological undertones of the site.
Underfoot, a path of sand embedded with footprints provides a tactile dimension to the installation. This material element not only guides the viewer through the space but also evokes the dry, harsh physicality of the dam site itself. The sound of walking on sand generates a subtle but continuous sonic interaction, reinforcing the viewer’s bodily presence within the work.
By foregrounding the material and psychological residues of Soviet infrastructure, Talas Kept My Shadow aims to open a broader conversation about the remnants of Janus-faced empire.The project sits at the intersection of decolonial critique, film, and immersive media practice—drawing attention to the ways in which power is not only built, but also remembered, felt, and inherited.
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