In Search of Another Life

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 fear of witnessing the final breakdown of the state, they abandon their "alien" homes and lives, driven by hope for another life. We become part of a united movement—change. The desperate search for a new life, where forbidden dreams can be realized, where faceless things become bright and senseless yet sacred, where one can find oneself, drives us forward. Only movement gives me hope of another life, a life where I can open up and find myself in another reality.

Everyone dreams of a better life, twisting pedals along the distance of one's journey, imagining oneself as a free bird. And only the abandoned things, like washed-up spinning wheels, will remain to keep memory of you beyond the 'new life.' They are part of the united mechanism of the 'migration movement,' like threads from the past that became part of me, and now the distance between us, like an endless thread in the spinning wheel, stretches toward my 'other, new life.'

The photos of houses inscribed with "For Sale," which I captured during my nationwide travels between 2007 and 2010, are like phantoms that accompany everyone from the capital of Kyrgyzstan to its remote regions. These photos are fixed signs of movement that symbolize the conditions of society, like banners. Behind every inscription is a story—extraordinary or ordinary—and beyond each person lies their own destination: America, Europe, Asia.

I, too, long to find a place for a better new life, where I can become an artist, not a marginal figure; a buyer, not a looter; a human being, not a victim of revolution. There, the spinning wheels will also exist, but they will not cling to my "other life."