ALASH ORDA – the horde of Alash
The largest landlocked country in the world, Kazakhstan has long navigated through history and great empires. From Alexander to Genghis Khan, from the Russian conquest to Soviet integration, it has hardly known a period as a nation-state, with the exception of the autonomy of Alash, from 1917 to 1920, a liberal-nationalist political parenthesis between the Tsarist and Soviet authoritarian eras. Independent in 1991, propelled into the fallow ideological space born from the dislocation of the USSR of which he was the last member by accident, he had to construct an alternative discourse of national cohesion while claiming a distant glorious past. A complicated challenge as its territory was an open-air laboratory for the industrial, atomic, agricultural, political and social experiments of the USSR, traumatic experiences of which the national psyche retains after-effects. An immense challenge for a country whose intellectual elite was strangled by the Stalinist purges and whose community balance of Soviet power sharing favored Slavic groups and Russian speakers. At independence, Kazakhs were a minority in their own homeland. Alash Orda questions the roots of Kazakh identity, a bulwark against the appetite of its big Russian neighbor and agent of Kazakhstan’s independence.
Frédéric Noy
Long based in Africa, Frederic Noy documented LGBTI minorities in East Africa for several years, then the dilemma between environment and survival of the populations bordering Lake Victoria, work rewarded by the Visa D’Or magazine. His latest project chronicles the construction of Kazakhstan’s identity, in an environment where the contrast between contemporary aspirations and heritage is nowhere higher in the post-Soviet perimeter. His reports appear regularly in the international press.
Exhibition presented free of charge in the 1912 Building of La Pulperie.
Exhibition presented within the framework of the Zoom Photo Festival Saguenay.
For more information on the Zoom Photo Festival Saguenay, consult the zoomphotofestival.ca
