Artists reflect on Central Asia’s Soviet “cotton curse”

All post-Soviet nations have traumas, common and ‘individual’. Uzbekistan’s ‘individual’ trauma is linked to ‘the cotton curse’ – the Soviet economic planners’ idea to turn it into a cotton plantation.

The idea turned into Uzbekistan’s national tragedy. It is the subject of an exhibition that opened this month at Almaty’s Aspan Gallery, jointly with the Uzbek 139 Documentary Center.

The PAXTA (cotton in Uzbek) exhibition is about the aftershocks that the Uzbek society is still experiencing as a result of the tragedy – through the eyes of nine Uzbek artists.

Curated by Yana Kharasho and Timur Karpov, the exhibition was first shown in Tashkent in 2022. It is a look at cotton as a monoculture that has completely changed the Central Asians’ life and the region’s physical landscape, Karpov said.

“A hundred years of cotton cultivation on a soil unsuitable for it, in a region with scares water reserves, which has led to one of the greatest environmental disasters – the drying out of the Aral Sea,” he said.

Karpov is familiar with the cotton issue not just from the artistic angle. For several years he monitored the use of forced and child labour in Uzbekistan’s cotton growing industry, for which he faced official persecution, including detention and torture.

The Uzbek authorities allowed the PAXTA exhibition to be held in Tashkent, but it was monitored by a secret service representative.

“Yes, a special service representative observes and, in a way, studies our activities. But that’s all. The authorities neither hinder nor help our work. It is a status quo that allows us to do project like this, involving memory and trauma,” Karpov said.

For Uzbekistan, the issue of cotton cultivation is a complex and multi-layered subject. It is about colonisation and decolonisation, about environmental protection, manipulation of public mind, and gender equality.

The Soviet authorities created a myth of ‘white gold’, a metaphor for cotton, and attempted to engrain it in the public mind using all media, including art – mosaics on residential buildings, decorations on various households items, such as tableware.

Generations of Uzbeks were made to believe that cotton is part of their identity and is their national pride.

The exhibition is an attempt to expose and trigger that memory and trauma as part of the post-colonial discourse and to crush that romanticised ‘white gold’ myth around cotton.

“The artists want to understand what does this two-word combination ‘Uzbekistan – cotton’ mean today to the society,” according to the exhibition organisers’ press statement. “What is its cultural meaning? Are those cotton symbols created by the Soviet propaganda still around, still part of our everyday life, or have they transformed and what do they mean today?”

Three of the displays are about illegal use of child labour in cotton picking – a practice that was in place in Uzbekistan until 2015. Children worked alongside adults, living in makeshift conditions by cotton fields.

Artist Dilyara Kaipova reflects on it in her work “Pakhtakor” (Cotton picker), Anna Ivanova in her work “Children Pick Cotton”, and Aleksandr Frolov in his work “Cotton Bomb”.

Photographer Umida Akhmedova offers a visual study of the ideological presentation of cotton as a symbol of Uzbekistan’s future prosperity.

Another photographer Nabi Agzamov shows, through a collage of maps and photographs, how the cotton cultivation destroyed Central Asia’s balance of water resources, leading to an environmental disaster — the dying of the Aral Sea. On top of the excessive use of water, the cotton cultivation involved heavy use of pesticides, which poisoned the soil and water for ever.

Another artist, Vyacheslav Akhunov uses Soviet symbols alongside Western ones, like Pepsi and Coca-

Cola to show that the old ideological symbol has been replaced with new ones, and people get accustomed to new times, but the old trauma remains.

Another work by Anna Ivanova, “Cotton Harvester”, raises the issue of gender inequality in cotton growing, with up to 75 percent of weeders and pickers in cotton fields being women.

The Soviet propaganda dealt with it by creating a cult around Tursynay Akhunova, a female cotton harvester operator, promoting her as a role model for all Uzbek women.

“Millions of people were enslaved for the sake of the Soviet Union’s self-sufficiency in cotton. The

Uzbeks were completely brainwashed to worship cotton,” Akhunov said.

Meanwhile, at present Uzbekistan earns about 1bn dollars a year from growing and selling cotton, while the Uzbek labour migrants’ remittances amount to 1.5bn dollars.

Cotton has failed to bring the promised prosperity and happiness.

The exhibition is on until January 2024.

By Gaukhar Satpayeva

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