Tselinny was not a ruin, but perhaps in a deep sleep. It remembered only fragments of its past, its identity altered by the passage of time. 
Asif Khan

My first instinct was to create a steppe—a continuous ground plane on which any person could walk from street to foyer to auditorium and out to the park without the multiple level changes of the original building. I wanted to re-think it as a landscape—a horizon. This “Tselina” could finally become a true fertile ground for future generations of artists, a place as open and welcoming as the vast cinema once was. 
Asif Khan

At the heart of the transformation is a softened threshold to the rigid concrete frame of the cinema—a cloud-like screen which invites us to inhabit a new state of mind. This cloud represents the spirit of ancient Kazakh gods, Tengri and Umai, sky and earth, masculine and feminine. The cloud meeting the ground is form and formlessness, inviting and ephemeral. One layer of history has been grown through by ancient creative energies.
Asif Khan

The exhibition

From Sky to Earth displays the approach to place and architecture that underpin the reconstruction of Tselinny. It highlights a particular architectural sensitivity that emerges as a response to a place with a complex and layered past, where natural forces, myth and distant memories co-exist with multiple layers of rapid growth and colonial construction. Instead of simply rejecting or erasing the recent past, the brief and sentiment for the new Tselinny was from the outset to reclaim and regenerate. The new design, reframes the difficult layers of the past and redeems ones lost underneath them. It recognises the positive aspects of the old building, embracing its central place in the urban grid and its role as a local icon and important public space for encounters and memories of multiple generations, while critically confronting the problems related to the recent layers of the past. By re-establishing relationships to deeper layers of local history and culture and by trusting in the creative and inventive power of architecture, it renders the old cinema anew, creating a building that reconnects, reinvents and proposes something entirely new.

What is on show? The exhibition fills in the foyer of the building with a display of objects, models and drawings from Asif Khan's studio and personal collection of objects gathered during the architect's travels through Kazakh landscapes and Almaty. These objects present a constellation of ideas, inspirations and studies that materialised into the physical shape of new Tselinny. 

The show makes visible the thinking behind the project and how it evolved since 2017 when the project commenced with Asif Khan as its architect, alongside the Kazakh architect Zaure Aitayeva, his wife, and his closest collaborator on Tselinny. By displaying the material signs of the labour and flow of research, the exhibition celebrates the creative power of architecture and shows how the project unfolded in the architect's studio and drawing board as much as on the ground, listening to and learning from the place. Amongst the objects, are photographs taken by Khan on his phone throughout the process, offering a personal glimpse of his journey over the past eight years. The materials on display show how ambitious dreams and a new kind of architectural sensitivity towards the site and its past were brought together on the ground to build foundations and make space for a new kind of institution.

The design of the show and its modes of representation, developed by Khan and his studio in dialogue with the curator, devises multiple ways of representation to convey the thinking and events behind the project. The round table at the centre of the show evokes a dastarkhan, a space and ritual of congregation around food, that can during the exhibition be set for dinner parties to bring people together. Inside the table, objects float on top of a cloud made of raw wool and are laid in the shape of a vast celestial map that depicts, to Khan's description, exactly the starry sky on the night of Tselinny's first opening in 1964. Just as in the building, the new is presented in constant, creative dialogue with the past.

Juxtaposed with the rigour of the process displayed through materials from the architect's studio, the exhibition displays a series of dioramic models, titled Lesser Known Scenes from the Recent Life of Tselinny, through the hands of a local model maker. The dioramas document what were, according to Khan, key moments in the development of the project and highlight the transition of the building from one in a substantially altered and neglected state and far from its original glory. In 2017, the building´s facade featured poor quality re-glazing and wild signage. Shopfronts, kiosks and other structures had sprung inside it and outside on its perimeters like mushrooms growing on a fallen tree. The models portray the "day 1" condition of the building as it was found when the redesign began; the rediscovery and restoration of the large, legendary mural by Evgeny Sidorkin that covers the wall of its foyer but was forgotten behind drywall for decades; as well as other events and moments of realisation during the process of re-design and -construction. The realistic, but uncanny models present a storyboard or a montage of scenes from the site as in a dream-like state, looking for its place and identity. This mode of representation offers an immediately relatable image of the recent reality of the building pinning the beginnings of the project down to the urban realities of the place. 

The title of the show captures the intention to dream big but also to bring the visions onto the ground, to look beyond the usual, not in order to fly far out, but in order to understand where you already are. From Sky to Earth reflects the aim of the design to look for inspiration from beyond western concepts of progress and modernity and to find a new critical, regional sensitivity that can co-exist with multiple, also unwanted layers and aspects of the past, while at the same time looking through them to rediscover a deeper ground to build a future on. Looking beyond one-dimensional (Western) concepts of progress and modernity that are inescapably entangled with histories of colonialism and exploitation, the redesign of Tselinny listens to the sky and the earth to create a space for the future.

A complex past

Almaty is a site at the crossroads of ancient civilisations. Inhabited for millennia, it grew considerably in the 19th and 20th centuries becoming a centre for the area under Russian and Soviet rule. The Saint Nicholas Cathedral, completed in 1904 behind the Tselinny site and located at a key crossroads of the city's grid, was built as the monumental ending to a thoroughfare and a shining symbol of Russian colonial presence in Almaty. The cinema, that rose in 1964 deliberately in front of the church, acted as a symbol of the Soviet power and life of the city. While both buildings functioned as important centres of public life in the city, they can also be seen as gestures dictated by the colonial centre. The reconstruction of Tselinny set out to explore how the positive aspects of this heritage could be retained and respected, while also openly and critically confronting the more difficult parts of Kazakhstan´s and Almaty´s history. The challenge became how to encounter and overcome the difficult layers of the past, rather than ignore or simply adopt them. In response, the new Tselinny seeks to critically face them, but looks to the future, while grounded in deeper layers of local past and culture.

The name Tselinny—virgin lands— was itself a rubric for a Soviet campaign to exploit and extract the steppe, harness it for the good of the centre over the local communities. Naming the cinema Tselinny manifested in the centre of the city a vision of Kazakhstan as a new land ready for cultivation in service to the Soviet ideal. Brought into this context, the rubric not only recast Kazakhstan as a space but also as a culture seemingly without a past or culture of its own. The cinema and its architecture, adapted from a standard design, presented a similar centrally dictated homogenising gesture, which engaged with local aesthetics and identities only as they were useful and contained within a framework controlled by the centre. The monumental sgraffito mural by Sidorkin that adorns the entire wall of the foyer exhibits this approach. It evokes mythical language and lore related to Kazakh pasts beyond colonial histories, but within a narrative that uses Kazakh symbols as tropes to tell a story of progress and modernisation that is strange to them, depicting an inevitable, one-dimensional progress of modernity. Moreover, the story exists only within the safe confines of the modern framework of the Tselinny. 

The redesign of Tselinny seeks to challenge, reconciliate and reconfigure the relationships to the multiple layers of the past. It embraces and re-enhances the aspects of the Soviet building held dear by the local community, its public character and quality as a space for encounter and private memories. At once, it reclaims the mythical language of the mural and traces its relations to the ground below and beyond the Soviet layer of construction. The new design reframes the building and its past by envisioning a new layer and sensitivity that critically, but softly, frames the past and the present, turning it into an oasis for redefining and reinvigorating a future relationship with the place, its pasts and the broader environment. The project of the redesign— from defining the programme and brief for the building to inventing of the spatial, formal and material solutions— has in itself been an attempt to process and find a way of reconciliation to the layered and complex questions of the past. The exhibition makes visible and opens up this process.

New Tselinny and how it is made

The new architecture of Tselinny works with the context and history of its site not only as a positive force, but also taking a stance on the difficult questions. It responds to the questions of what if the spirit and history of a place is not one to fully embrace, but also to be critically undone, as is often the case in postcolonial situations. What, instead of simply erasing and rejecting, or ignoring, the past, can be done? What kind of design strategies can be thought of? 

Here the western canon of critical regionalism that made famous architects like Alvar Aalto, and Alvaro Siza for carefully engaging with their sites and embedding local sensitivities, materialities and traditions in their otherwise modernist designs can be seen as one point of reference. But, often critical only in a positive way and in looking for inspiration, this tradition falls short of means to deal with questions of conflicting, complex and violent pasts. The tradition that does offer something to subvert such unwanted pasts is the revolutionary tradition of architecture. The new Tselinny is revolutionary architecture in the sense that it actively and critically engages with and devises strategies to deal with and subvert historical colonial power structures that underpin culture, knowledge and society. It merges this impetus to undo and reconfigure relationships related a difficult past with a sensitivity of critical regionalism to ground the work in local tradition, but going beyond material and spatial traditions deep into local myth and culture, and adding to the mix an openness and dexterity in harnessing technological solutions to make the ideas reality. 

Listening to the earth and the ground beneath the colonial layers of the urban grid and architecture, the project unveils an ancient riverbed and traces materials, meanings and spatial concepts arising from the steppe as they have co-existed with local people for millennia. Earth and the ground beneath the site play an important role in the thinking behind the redesign of Tselinny. Almaty´s ground is full of stones rounded and smoothed by water, a memory of the deeper history of the place. Khan's landscape design redeems this natural layer hidden beneath the urban grid. Bringing them into the process of design, the project re-establishes them as part of a new foundation for the future. Looking further for the new ground, the reconstruction goes structurally a long way to establish this new ground as an even, levelled surface, something that as a technical solution comes together with the reinforcement and reconstruction of a significant amount of the building's structure for earthquakes—an invisible component of the project that took the greatest work to evaluate and implement. Removing steps that used to separate the different parts of the building, the new design brings the foyer at the front and the auditorium at the back onto one level, making an equal ground and providing easy access to all. What might seem like a small change, is a large gesture to establish a new, plane territory, a new “tselina” for a new generation of Kazakh art and culture.

Besides the earth and the ground, the redesign reaches to the sky for its power of reinvention. The sky or a cloud is a key formal and conceptual motif that was present in the project for the new Tselinny from the outset of the design process. The vision of a particular kind of large, round and low-hanging rain cloud that forms on the steppe and has many mythological interpretations was something Khan saw on his early visits to the site and then sought to translate into architecture. The cloud connects in Kazakh mythology to the sky but also to rebirth and fertility. For the thinking of how the redesign could reclaim the difficult concept of Tselinny and the virgin lands, the cloud became a veil of possibility that softly embraces and renders the earth anew with life. The cloud creates a new horizon of possibilities within the existing context. It provides a force that embraces, regenerates, and reinvigorates rather than rejects, erases and replaces. Together with the re-established ground, it also creates space that has a different logic to that of the grid, one that is irregular, open and boundless.

In order to arrive at such concepts and solutions, Khan´s practice begins with a deep attentiveness towards the site and place. His approach is based on spending a great amount of time in the place and with its people, researching and finding connections, until a principle or concept arrives. In Khan's words, “it comes as sometimes a series of words, or a fleeting vision”, which appears “first as a solution without a proof, or a feeling without description” to guide him to establish the makings of the project and direct the process of developing form and space. “I look to my personal feelings as a source for the artistic response and design” he describes it himself. Comparing it to method acting, he speaks of finding the character of a place to then improvise in order to create something new: “I try to think as the place. To let it take over my mind. To become it. This takes time. At some point I can answer the question of what I need to become. It's not an easy process, and I can't explain it, but it is an innate demand that I have to respond to. I choose projects today based on this aspect alone - it must connect with me, mean something deeply to me, and if I have found the truest answers, those answers will also hold value for others.”

Khan's approach aims for a synchronicity with a place, facing its traditions and voices through present reality and at eye level to then develop them into something new. A diachronic layer of understanding comes second, through research conducted in the architects studio. In some projects this has meant engaging and spending time with local designers and artists, finding the iconic objects and forms that inform a place and its culture, then going deep into research into crafts and material techniques particular to a place in order to reinvent them in a new scale and expression. With the project of Tselinny, such research and engagement with place occurred in parallel to an lengthy time of repair, reconstruction and design during which Khan spent extensive periods of time in Kazakhstan and forged a new creative partnership with Zaure Aitayeva, both in the project and in life. 

The exhibition shows the personal journey and the imaginative research behind the attempt to construct a cloud as architecture and establish a new ground for the future of the city. It displays fragments of thought and moments of condensation from the design process that display the method of Asif Khan´s creative practice, where ideas move from high above towards the ground and articulation through matter. Inside the studio Khan's projects often develop instinctively moving from an idea or deep feeling to a series of fast sketches, then further to modelling. Khan does not find the idea through drawing and modelling, but finds an expression through them for something that has already been formed within. The ideas are then developed and articulated through a sequence of his fast sketches, then often modelled, either on computer screen or on the desk, usually first with materials worked on the spot, and then, in any kind of material imaginable to test the qualities and attunement to his original idea. 

The modelling of ideas in Khan's studio often takes days and uses a large number of different mediums. It is telling that the workshop space in Khan's studio is nearly as large as the office space. From models in wood or cardboard or to 3D printing or plaster casting in the studio workshop, these modelling operations often involve craftsmen and technologies nearby and far away. A material technology, a certain visual effect or a structure is honed as long as needed to reach the idea, and if existing technologies don't suffice, Khan has often sought to develop new ones to fully express his spatial and formal concepts. Through sketching, modelling, collaborating and pushing structural and material technologies, large ideas are developed through to material and spatial expressions. 

In the redesign of Tselinny, the idea of constructing the cloud with a mythical power to renew acted as the key concept to be articulated. To understand how to do it, Khan´s research included explorations to at first to construct a white cloud-shaped mezzanine in the foyer (before the Sidorkin was re-discovered) to creating a vast tilted mirrored facade that would have lowered the reflection of the sky to the ground, to the eventually chosen solution, which combines vertical, curving lamellas in a line to create a flowing screen. This new facade allows a frontal transparency and vision towards the main artery of the city from in between the lamellas, retaining the building's original transparent and axial qualities. At once, the flowing forms of the elements themselves and in relation to one another create a variable visual effect that changes with movement and turns into a unified, lively shape when moved pass or observed from an oblique angle. This new, white surface that appears soft in its ever-changing form touches the ground lightly and creates a floating impression. Using such lamellas is something Khan has developed already in previous projects, namely in the Serpentine Summer House in London´s Kensington Gardens in 2016 and in his UK pavilion for Astana Expo 2017. Now the idea of such light and curving elements is refined and reaches its full potential as a structure, as well as conceptually, as something soft and ephemeral but at once powerful. They create a boundless space that is always alive and changing. This new dynamism creates a strong but soft contrast to the cubical forms of the cinema both as a shape and as a spatial concept. 

The forms of the new facade also speak to the concepts behind the redesign, the sky and the earth. In their animation and dynamism with movement and light, the elements of the facade resemble wind running through the blades of grass, the living things of the earth, shaped by the power of the sky. Articulated in the façade, the cloud embraces the building, rendering it anew while retaining its past. It acts as the formal device that can introduce a new sensitivity and scale to counter and reinvent the previous layers of monumental Tsarist and Soviet urbanism. The soft, organic and humane shapes offer at once a touching point to the scale of the human body, as well as suggest a new boundless scale, that of the steppe and its vast skies.

The side facades continue the theme of the cloud but look to the past of Kazakh culture and re-evoke the forms and symbols of traditional Kazakh art, also present in Sidorkin´s mural inside the building and continue in line with the reinterpretation of parts of the mural on the exterior of the building by Sidorkin´s son Vadim a couple of decades ago. Now, the forms of the past are re-iterated on the facades as abstract symbols and kind of modern-day petroglyphs, creating a recognizable but open idiom for the building. These motifs enrich the building and form a contemporary adornment connecting cultural memory with modern expression. They create a new language of ornamentation that decorates the newly constructed south and north wings, bridging past and present through a visual dialogue that resonates throughout the building.

Inside the building Sidorkin's mural has been carefully restored, after having been thought lost as it was forgotten behind a drywall. The treatment of the mural exemplifies the nuanced approach to the past that the redesign employs throughout. Besides its re-installation, decisions had to be made on what to do with the extensive parts destroyed by previous renovations, as well as the multiple layers of paint that had been added over decades of over-restorations. Now, the aim has not been to blindly reconstruct, but to restore the mural into its original condition. Its added layers of paint have been stripped back to the original and cleaned but not repainted to imitate the original effect, rather in a subtle but warm palette of colour, and muted as a background not to overpower the other art and ideas on display in the building. The parts lost over the decades have been reconstructed and painted in a way that is distinct from the original, so that its scars and damages are not covered, but left visible. Being made intact again allows for future generations with new ideas to repaint it in a scheme which matches their time. 

The same concepts and principles are also reflected in how its spaces have been organised. The original spatial qualities of the interior have been retained but rethought. The large foyer is returned to its open form, but is now column-free, while the cubical space of the cinema is redesigned as a space for art and performance. In both spaces, though, the one-directionality and control that the spaces historically expedited have been replaced with a more multifocal and multi-directional approach. The foyer now is not the only space for social engagement but opens into many kinds of spaces of congregation also for various kinds of more intimate encounters. Inside the large box of the cinema, the one-directionality of the media of film, projecting one vision for many to see, is replaced with a space of opportunity for more communicative and engaged kinds of performances. Natural light now let into space makes it visible as a whole. The removal of steps and barriers from in between further encourages an accessible and level engagement instead of one controlled by the space itself.

In its critical search for understanding and facing layered histories in Almaty, Tselinny joins a line of recent projects in which Khan has increasingly focused on questioning colonial pasts and imbalances of power historically encoded in built environments. Engagement with a place with a deep desire to understand it, the pushing of technological boundaries to execute an idea, together with the desire to use architecture to reconfigure power structures and rethink relationships to tradition, are the corner stones of Khan´s artistic and architectural practice. In Tselinny, they have been articulated with new power, scale and clarity, setting an example for the future.

Text and curation by Markus Lähteenmäki.