As 1991 continues to recede further into the past, Central Asia, the former Soviet territory positioned between Russia, China, and the Middle East, is in the process of reinventing itself. Central Asians still speak Russian, but less and less so as they both revive indigenous languages and learn English or Chinese. They remain mainly secular, a legacy of official Soviet atheism, but the practice of Islam is growing. The Soviet architectural legacy of concrete public housing remains, but new cities are taking design cues from places such as Dubai, Shanghai, and Kuala Lumpur. Formations is a photographic narrative of this region as it navigates the transitional period between its Soviet yesteryear and a still-undetermined future. My motivation for this body of work stems in part from my own experience emigrating, as a child, from Kyrgyzstan to the United States.
This project was done in collaboration with the editorial department at FABRICA.
Aleksey Kondratyev