By Harissa Beaumont
If you’d told me a year ago that I’d be spending a week at the Astana Contemporary Visions Art Fair in Kazakhstan, I’d have laughed, poured myself another glass of Sancerre, and assumed you’d been reading too much experimental fiction. And yet, there I was, in a city where temperatures hover around -20°C and everything seems designed to remind you that you are, in fact, not as glamorous as you think you are.
The venue itself was a brutalist palace of glass and steel, as if someone had decided to build the Louvre Pyramid in the middle of a frozen steppe. Our booth was strategically placed between an Azerbaijani artist selling paintings of leopards playing canasta and a Georgian collective whose primary medium appeared to be old tractor parts. Across from us was the pièce de résistance: a towering installation by a Kazakh oligarch’s protégé—a life-sized yurt constructed entirely of AK-47s. It was titled “Nomadism Reimagined,” but mostly it reimagined the definition of “health and safety hazard.”
The fair started with the kind of logistical nightmare that only the art world can conjure. A shipment of works—delicate canvases by British minimalist Bea Faulkner—was delayed in customs because someone forgot to file the proper paperwork. As I stood in an icy warehouse arguing with a customs officer, who kept insisting that the paintings might be “anti-government propaganda,” I experienced what I can only describe as an existential chill. Eventually, the works were released, but not before one of the canvases was precariously balanced on top of a forklift, which I could swear was straight out of an opera: “Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore… and then I lost my masterpiece to bureaucracy.”
Once the booth was set up, things began to look brighter. The Kazakh collectors were a fascinating mix of oil tycoons, oligarchs, and the occasional avant-garde fashion designer. One particularly enthusiastic buyer—a fur-clad magnate with an entourage the size of a small country—fell in love with a neon piece by Monty Carlo. “This is art,” he declared, jabbing a finger at it. “It says something about our times.” When I asked him what he thought it said, he replied, “That I am rich enough to buy it.” I suppose honesty is a virtue.
A young Kazakh artist named Altyn, who creates immersive installations out of horsehair and sand, came by our booth and loudly critiqued everything. “Too Western,” she sniffed, gesturing at a sculpture of melted iPhones in a sink by Milo. She later softened, though, and spent a full 20 minutes explaining her theory that the Silk Road was the first conceptual artwork in history. At some point, she offered to trade one of her horsehair installations for Bea Faulkner’s Untitled #27. I declined, but part of me regrets it—I could probably have used it as insulation.
By midweek, we’d sold several pieces, including a monumental work of the little known slums of Windsor by Thierry Duval to an Uzbek collector who insisted it would look “amazing in my dacha.” I didn’t have the heart to ask why anyone would hang a painting of urban desolation in a house designed for summer leisure. Meanwhile, I spent the better part of Wednesday dodging questions from a local journalist who wanted to know whether I thought NFTs were “dead yet.” I suggested that NFTs were “evolving,” which seemed to satisfy him enough to move on to photographing the AK-47 yurt. Unfortunately he got too close and fell onto a weapon which was still loaded. Shots rang out across the fair, narrowly missing several visiting dignitaries. The journalist was arrested, the last I heard he was claiming that he was a performance artist.
The fair’s grand finale was a gala dinner at a Soviet-era opera house that had been repurposed into a luxury event space. The theme was “Bridging East and West,” which apparently translated to serving foie gras dumplings while a local folk band performed a very enthusiastic rendition of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. At one point, a rather exuberant collector leaned across the table to tell me, “Kazakhstan is the future of art.” He then spilled a glass of vodka onto his silk tie and declared it “a statement.”
By the time I flew back to London, I had frostbitten fingers, a promising commission from a Kazakh hotel chain billionaire, and an inbox full of emails demanding to know why their art hadn’t arrived yet. As Puccini would remind me, “Non siamo fatti per i climi freddi,” or, as I interpret it: art dealers are not designed for the steppes.
Until next week,
Harissa