We used to be Seaweed

The Aral Sea is an inland waterbody in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, fed by two rivers. Once the world’s fourth-largest lake, it has been reduced to an eighth of its size since the 1950s, primarily due to water being diverted for cotton farming.

It has become a popular disaster voyeur destination. My project began similarly, visiting the Aral desert while exploring northern Kazakhstan, where my ancestors once lived. Anticipating abandoned fishing boats and dry seabeds, I found unexpected tenderness and almost invisible but persistent life instead. The desert revealed muted, dusty colors, a peculiar light, and toxic particles of salt and sand, settling over everything like superfine velvety powder.

On the Uzbekistan side the landscape is not the same, but the impact on people and nature is similar. To reach the receded sea from Moynaq, a former fishing port, locals travel 3 hours by car and endure cold November waters to collect artemia for a Chinese company. This region, Karakalpakstan, an autonomous republic in Uzbekistan, has lost its sea but gained gas fields under the dried seabed, leaving no hope for restoration.

These developments are part of the legacy of the modernist era: extractive economy, cotton monoculture that depleted the environment, mastering water, controlling resources, and neglecting the minorities and local communities. The region was also one of the destinations for deported “enemy peoples” during the Soviet era, and by the mid-20th century, over 10% of the population consisted of these forcibly displaced groups.

Modernity also brought the region rapid but traumatic emancipation, centralized redistribution of certain benefits and technologies, and an impressive artistic heritage. Nukus, the capital of Karakalpakstan, is home to the world-renowned Savitsky Museum, celebrated for its extraordinary collection of Soviet and Turkestan avant-garde. It also holds modernist paintings of local artists, many of which depict the Aral Sea as it once was—full of life and promise.

This exhibition engages contemporary art in dialogue with avant-garde and modernist traditions. Historical works deepen the understanding of contemporary creations, while contemporary pieces will add context and new layers to the pieces from the museum collections.

So, what is the Aral Sea?
• A vanishing sea, a biodiverse habitat, a toxic wasteland, a new environmental reality, a case study in adaptation, a processual disaster
• A geopolitical battleground, a symbol of Soviet exploitation, a global environment lesson
• A nourisher, a symbol of depletion, a tourist potential
• A former fishing industry hub, a collapsed economy, Mad-Max style artemia supplier
• A capitalist resource for China, a hunting grounds for the UAE
• An international gas consortium bypassing local employment
• An undisclosed gas reserve under a dry seabed
• A climate influencer, a source of airborne pollutants, a desertified void
• A site of nostalgia, a source of displacement, a cultural identity marker
• A logistical barrier, a lost transportation link, a part of Silk Road route
• A hydrological feature, a salt plain, a sedimentary archive
• An ossified waterbody, an atrophied ecosystem, a fossilized hope
• A site of civilizations, a memory archive, a post- human relic
• A distant bird’s cry, salty milk, superfine sand powder in the air
• A silenced sea, a velvety touch of the desert

We Used to Be Seaweed brings together five contemporary artists:

Saodat Ismailova
Saodat Ismailova’s Fishing in an Invisible Sea portrays the lives of three generations of fishermen, reflecting resilience and memory while capturing a connection to something no longer physically present. In the exhibition, stills from her film are displayed alongside modernist paintings of the Aral from the collection of Savitsky museum, which depict the waterbody before it receded.

Her focus on the mundane—the fishermen’s persistence and the rhythms of their work—reveals broader societal shifts. The Aral Sea stands as a symbol of transition, from the optimism of pre-modernized nature to the consequences of human intervention. Ismailova critiques this failed promise, showing how traditional practices endure despite environmental and social collapse.

Her film portrays this “in-between” state, presenting the Aral Sea as neither fully lost nor fully alive—an invisible sea, fragmented landscapes, and lives reshaped by ecological collapse. It captures the enduring tensions between progress, tradition, and loss, situating the Aral as a metaphor for the fragility of human ambition, culture, and environment, while presenting it as a symbol of resilience and memory.

Alexander Ugay
Alexander Ugay’s work, Shoreline #1 (Moynaq, 43.7905°N, 59.0368°E), is set at the intersection of memory, dimensions of time and space, and the materiality of information. Created as part of his project More Than Chaos, Less Than Emptiness, it documents the landscapes of the Aral Sea’s former shores using pinhole cameras—empty black boxes that capture, hide and contain physical images as traces of reality. This technique eliminates conventional focal planes, producing a flat surface where the foreground and background merge into a unified sharpness. This deliberate collapse of depth transforms the panoramic view into a scroll-like projection, redefining how spatial and temporal realities can be perceived.

The coordinates in the title of the work tie together multiple dimensions: they describe space by indexing the exact location in Moynaq, specify time by connecting the present desolation to the history of the Aral region, encapsulate the memory of the receded sea and the displaced ethnic minorities, including Ugay’s own Korean heritage, who were deported to this region in 1937.

Ugay’s choice to document the former shoreline of the fishing port of Moynaq, avoiding the iconic ships stranded in the sands, reflects his broader interest in the tension between chaos and emptiness. His focus shifts from symbolic ruins to the landscape itself, seeking to understand how physical spaces hold meaning. This search reveals his preoccupation with the material nature of information: even in its most abstract forms, information remains embodied in physical processes, ultimately reducible to the binary logic of bits—existence or non-existence. The photograph, then, is a material inscription of memory, where the geometry of space, time, and matter converge into surfaces marked by events and histories.

Lena Pozdnyakova & Eldar Tagi
Lena Pozdnyakova & Eldar Tagi’s Bodies of Water / Listening to Dead Fish Singing is an installation featuring a soundscape composed of field recordings, water, imagined fish songs, and voices from the region. These sounds play through speakers draped in textile sculpture, anchoring ephemeral sounds in materiality.

The work addresses the shared consequences of the Aral’s desiccation, which links the countries of Central Asia through ecological and cultural ties. It also bridges the divide between humans and nature, using water as a symbol of interconnected systems. This work contains the notion of oceanic memory within the human body, carrying the sea brine within its cells, suggesting fluidity, transitions, and restoring ancestral connections through embroidery as a traditional craft and the cyclical process of drawing, erasing, and redrawing on the textile.

While the artists have never visited the Aral Sea region, they grew up in Kazakhstan surrounded by stories of this nearly mythical lake—both abstract and apocalyptically real. This focus created a tension between distance and intimacy, opening a space where stories of people, the loss of biodiversity, and environmental collapse converge. The artist duo seeks commonality with others through stories, reflecting on what it means to belong or to remain detached from a place.

The loss of biodiversity brought about by the lake’s desertification and shrinkage is often regarded with statistical detachment, perhaps because we as humans cannot truly comprehend the end of the world through the eyes of a sturgeon or a trout. By shifting the focus to the voices of silenced lifeforms, this work invites us to step outside a human-centered viewpoint, recognizing the interconnected histories of all life.

Lilia Bakanova
This textile installation reflects the transformation of the Aral Sea and its ecosystems through a speculative lens. The artist modified traditional Kazakh felting techniques, introducing raw silk and cotton produced with water from the rivers that once nourished the Aral Sea. The act of gathering cotton became a way to connect the artist to the memory of her grandmother, who left Uzbekistan for Kazakhstan and never spoke of her childhood spent working in the cotton fields.

The work envisions and zooms in on the barely visible life that once thrived in the sea, imagining micro- and macroalgae, phyto- and zooplankton. This close-up creates a varied texture that invites touch, creating a tactile connection to the lost ecosystems. The muted golden and beige tones resemble desert sands, while the fibrous structures between semi-transparent layers suggest organic, flowing forms, appearing both fragile and enduring.

The felting process, inherently entangling, mirrors the interconnectedness of ecological and cultural histories. By inviting interaction through touch and smell, and linking lost ecosystems to cultural practices, the work encourages viewers to engage physically with these ties and to reflect on how cultural traditions can preserve and convey the memory of ecological loss.

Lilia Bakanova
Open Call Exhibition
© apexart 2025