Crossing Kazakhstan

Xiaoxuan Lu, Benny Shaffer, Justin Stern

Installation of three single-channel videos, photographs, maps

The A2 Highway runs parallel to the Turkmenistan-China Gas Pipeline and traces a fixed line from the Chinese bordertown of Khorgos and across Kazakhstan until it meets Uzbekistan near the city of Tashkent. This exhibition represents a visual index of this route, revealing glimpses of Kazakhstanʼs past, present, and future. Each image is a gesture, a momentary encounter, a fleeting insight into a landscape scattered with cultural artifacts. It stands witness to the dual course of pipeline and road through terrain once traversed by Silk Road travelers. It displays a series of “everyday monuments” that reflect and proclaim changes occurring across Kazakhstan and Central Asia more broadly. The images serve to make visible how the pipeline and the highway, the Soviet legacy and independent Kazakhstan, work together to produce cultural spaces along a linear landscape.