The Brooklyn Rail

The Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture in Almaty, Kazakhstan emerges somewhat in reverse, envisioned from the outset as an institution to fill a specific building. Tselinny’s mission was largely shaped by navigating the technical and ideological limits prompted by renovating a historic structure. Initial probing revealed much of the former cinema to be structurally compromised from a botched (but lively) conversion to a nightclub and shopping center in the 2010s. Still, architects Asif Khan and his partner Zaure Aitayeva were persuaded by community pressure to preserve the building and return it to public use. With no permanent collection, Tselinny’s programming emerged from conversations between Khan, Aitayeva, director Jamilya Nurkalieva, and founder Kairat Boranbayev as a flexible venue for hosting exhibitions, performances, and events, echoing the building’s many former lives. It will also act as host to a digital archive project intended to raise the global profile of Central Asian contemporary art.

Khan and Aitayeva’s design refreshes and recontextualizes the parts of the 1964 building that could be retained. The main theater hall has been repurposed as a “grey box”-style central gallery space around which much of the original building has been demolished and rebuilt using a combination of old and new materials. The theater, with its cavernous dimensions and theatrical infrastructure, encourages the production of large-scale exhibitions and performances that until recently Almaty has not had dedicated space for, and its walls have been carefully punched to allow public access from a side courtyard and public park. In conversation, Khan speaks of designing programmatic uncertainty into the building, and hopes this approach can provoke unexpected outcomes. He notes that the loading dock’s façade and paving was treated the same as the rest of the building, and how the oversized doors to a service elevator could lend to use as an outdoor performance venue.

Other moments within the building have been built anew. Key among these is the reconstruction of the building’s dramatic foyer that terminates an axial view corridor along one of the Golden Quarter’s gridded boulevards. A monumental curtain wall, a daring feat of engineering at the time of the cinema’s completion, spanned the long side of the structure open to the sidewalk, framing views deep into the building and its celebrated sgraffito mural by artist Yevgeniy Sidorkin. The radical translucency of this space rendered invisible the division between outside and inside at night, effectively conveying the civic aspirations of the Nikita Khrushchev administration which financed it by reproducing the conceit of the theater’s “fourth wall” at the scale of the city. It is this feature which many Almatians remember the building by.

Tselinny, and by extension Sidorkin’s sgraffito, illustrate how the view of Kazakhstan as an isolated, empty periphery to Moscow structured a culture of contradictions in Almaty during the Soviet period. The sgraffito, depicting graphically stylized figures wearing traditional Kazakh dress in recreation, racing horses, reading literature, dancing to a shaman’s dombra (a 2-string lute), underlines the charged memories that course through the project. The original Tselinny Cinema was named to commemorate the Tselina [uncultivated, virgin land] project to agriculturalize the Kazakh steppe. Developed in 1954 in response to wartime famine, the project aimed to secure a stable food source for the Soviet Union but made incorrect assumptions about the resilience of the fragile steppe ecology, severely degrading the soil, desiccating the Aral Sea, and forcing many of the remaining nomadic Kazakhs to permanently resettle in urban areas like Almaty.

Today, Almaty is a multicultural, cosmopolitan city—both in spite and because of the mass relocation of ethnic minority German, Korean, and Russians in the USSR to Kazakhstan, and of intellectuals seeking a domestic safe-haven beyond the reach of the Politburo (Leon Trotsky and Sergei Eisenstein both passed through Almaty during periods of political disfavor). Yuri Gagarin last set foot on Kazakh soil, from where his rocket launched, before becoming the first human in outer space.

By retaining the Tselina name, the modern Tselinny Center reinhabits a history that can neither be embraced nor jettisoned whole cloth. Though buildings have existed in the Almaty region for millennia, the discipline of architecture only arrived and formalized with Tsarist colonization in the late nineteenth century. Because this conception of architecture is alien, because memories of nomadic preindustrial life trace back only a few generations, architecture here does not benefit from any assumption of ideological neutrality, and it is more or less given that the act of designing anew incorporates the construction of new histories.

The new Tselinny building emphasizes its composition as a collage. Sidorkin’s sgraffito has been reinstalled near its original location, but as fragments freshly rendered in monochromatic material and veiled by a new series of curved steel columns set within the lobby’s architectural frame. On the side facades, Khan has drawn the negative spaces of the sgraffito as a series of windows and light features imprinted into rough-cast concrete panels. This self-awareness towards context and the pre-existing differentiates Tselinny from other renovations of Soviet civic buildings in Almaty which are often, at best, agnostic towards their original architecture (Almaty Hotel, 1967, architects N.I. Ripinsky, I.A. Kartasi, A.Ya. Kossov, renovated 2018) or actively seek its erasure (Palace of the Republic, 1970, architects Yu. Ratushny, L. Ukhobotov, Nikolay Ripinsky, renovated 2010–11).

As a neighborhood monument, Khan’s Tselinny weaves neatly into Almaty’s existing social geography. Khan has designed a building with no backside; the formal plaza facing the original front of the building and which receives a long, axial view down Kabanbay Batyr Street bleeds into a generous, informal plaza that leads into the interior of the Soviet superblock. A redirected aryk [irrigation ditch] channels snowmelt from the mountains to feed a small patch of native grasses in this urban clearing that brings spatial unity to a discordant jumble of nightclubs, gardens, repair sheds, playgrounds, and a Russian Orthodox cathedral. A few blocks away on the Arbat, university students gather every night in the pedestrian mall to sing karaoke and dance to K-pop. It’s easy to imagine the kind of inclusive, unscripted urban events that Tselinny aims to prompt.