by Azadbek Bekchanov
2023

What stories are being told? From whom? For whom? Are we listening to the right ones? These are the questions that are always on my mind. It is about trying to build infrastructures, in a broad  sense, that can host stories that need to be told, again and again. This is what I am trying to do  since years now. I would like to talk about the concerns that I have. I feel like it’s finally the time to  do it after 3 years of being part of an artist-run space with people I’m close to and some less so. It  is not even that much, but I feel like I have things to say that I hope are a bit interesting or are  making sense. Talking about those topics is nevertheless tricky. It involves personal stories one  tries to make sense out of. It comes with the risk of overexposing your personal background and  conflicts. The white art world is so fond of our personal stories, of how it is difficult to grow up  when you’re from a diasporic background and the subsequent conflicts that come with it. They  need those stories because they don’t know how to deal with their culpability. 

Our stories become fungible material that can be extracted so they can live with their illusion of white innocence. They  feed off our conflicts to impose their own narrative, deciding who deserves to be heard and who doesn’t. How do we deal with it? How do we create infrastructure that can help protect us from a white gaze that will try, sooner or later, to use it against us? If we think of language as infrastructure, we can use it to make images and shape it to tell stories that are not that easily accessible to everyone. Telling stories by ourselves, for ourselves, is an important method that we need to bring into practice again. It is about whom we’re talking to, whom we tell our stories to.  

I feel like most of the curatorial projects I did were about rethinking questions in a collective way:  How do we carry memories from the past? What can these memories tell us about our reality? I  am interested in how we can retell stories that have been silenced because when they are  repeated over and over again, they begin to sound differently. This is how I feel about my  curatorial work; it is the same story that I am telling over and over again – of familial fragments, of  memories that I have inherited from my parents. It is about a fantasy of something that has left us. Curatorial practice can carry these questions because of its polyphonic nature. Many voices  inhabit us from our past, from what we have inherited, and it is time that we begin to make them  sound again.