Balqaş Jyry (The Song of Lake Balkhash), 2025
Video essay and installation, 19 min 40 sec
Artcom Platform, in collaboration with Akmaral Mergen
Music, sound design and voice: Akmaral Mergen
Context and artistic approach
Balqaş Jyry is a video essay and installation centred on Lake Balkhash, made within Artcom Platform's Care for Balkhash initiative. In the exhibition the video is shown inside a structure of shym shy, steppe reed. I entered this project already working with cultural memory, ecological trauma, colonial violence and the ethics of speaking about collective wounds. Here these questions are carried not through narrative, but through voice, sound and a shared space of listening.
The logic of jyr and the acoustic environment
The work follows the logic of jyr, the Kazakh tradition of epic storytelling and a vessel for collective memory: here it is approached through its spoken text and its physical properties, breath, rhythm, resonance and the grain of the voice.
Because the declamation is central, my approach to the soundscape was restrained, introducing very few extraneous sounds. I worked with the field recordings the collective made during their expeditions to Lake Balkhash. Some of them are left open, heard as they were taken. Others I take under water through filtering and pitch manipulation, so that the same material exists in two states at once: as document and as environment. This is what shifts the listener from the position of an outside observer to being immersed inside the water. The sparse percussive elements come from recorded sounds of a horse and hold this fluid environment to the ground.
Structure and documentary audio
The work is a cycle of five video essays, each with its own title. Speaking about collective pain required care with documentary sound. In the fourth essay, which addresses the Qantar events of January 2022, raw audio from the square — crowd, chaos, gunfire — enters the space. Against this documentary reality the collective introduced a song written for the work, Aırylgan dala beıbaq Balqaşynan… by Asylan Quanyshuly and Safina Aktay, performed by Safina Aktay with dombyra by Muratbek Ramankulov.
That recording became the musical core of the cycle. I isolated fragments of the dombyra playing and carried them across the other sections, building a new acoustic fabric out of material already charged with memory.
Voice
The voice runs through the whole cycle as its emotional current. I work from the weight of each phrase, letting the text turn into a continuous vocal line. This is what allows the water to emerge as a presence that speaks, rather than a landscape observed from outside.
Format
The work functions both as an exhibition piece and as a standalone film. In the installation the sound is kept as a stereo mix playing from the monitor, holding the focused, intimate format of a video essay inside the reed structure. In parallel the essay travels to cinemas and festivals.
Exhibitions, screenings and support
passing the fugitive on, 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, 2025
Techno-Ancestrality, IMPAKT, Utrecht
Asian Movie Night × Qyzqaras, Tremors Beneath the Surface, eight venues across the Netherlands, autumn 2025
Commissioned for the 13th Berlin Biennale and for the collection of FRAC Poitou-Charentes, France. Supported by the Tselinny Center for Contemporary Culture and the Goethe-Institut Kazakhstan.
Full team credits