In Search of Another Life (2007- 2010)

Installation: Training bike, eagle feathers, saddle, 20 moving spinning wheels, video, series of photographs; dimensions vary

Every day, hundreds of young people—women, men, the elderly, and children—leave Kyrgyzstan in search of a better life. Exhausted by uncertainty and the looming collapse of the state, they abandon their “alien” homes and lives, driven by hope for something else. We become part of a collective movement—change itself. The desperate search for a new life—where forbidden dreams can be realized, where the faceless becomes bright, the senseless sacred, where one can truly find oneself—propels us forward. Only movement offers hope: a life where I can open up, discover myself, and exist in a new reality. Everyone dreams of a better life, pedaling tirelessly across the distances of their journey, imagining themselves as free birds. Yet only abandoned objects—the washed-up, spinning wheels—remain, bearing memory beyond the “new life.” They are fragments of collective migration, threads from the past woven into the present, stretching endlessly into an unknown future.

Captured during my nationwide travels across Kyrgyzstan between 2007 and 2010, these photographs of houses marked “For Sale” resemble phantoms accompanying people from the capital to the most remote regions. These images are markers of movement, symbols of society’s conditions, and banners of change. Behind every inscription lies a story—ordinary or extraordinary—and beyond each person stretches their own destination: America, Europe, Asia. I have been looking for a place for a better life, where I can be an artist, not a marginal figure; a buyer, not a looter; a human being, not a victim of revolution. There, the spinning wheels will remain, but they will no longer cling to my “other life.”