The inaugural programme opens with a series of events under the title Barsakelmes. As with the Korkut Sonic arts Triennial curated by Tselinny, this approach – temporal, not merely spatial – is grounded in the nomadic, performative character of Kazakh culture. This first phase, a chance to get to know the building, will be centred around performances, concerts, and events and initiatives created by local and regional artists. Barsakelmes has been established in dialogue with the qazaq indie, Samrattama, Gulnur Mukazhanova, Dariya Temirkhan and other artists, musicians, scholars and architects. 

Barsakelmes was a former island in the Aral Sea, now a tract in the Aral region of the Kyzylorda region of Kazakhstan. The programme takes Barsakelmes as its focus geographically and conceptually, reimagining the myth of Nurtole, an ancient kyui, a traditional Central Asian form of musical song. Its events unfold with the democratic logic of myth-making, where the artist is no longer the author but an anonymous figure. With the sound of his kobyz, Nurtole banished a kingdom of marauding snake creatures to the Aral Sea — which today, centuries later, has disappeared due to Soviet extraction of natural resources, one of the world’s most significant man-made ecological disasters. Now that the water has gone, the snake creatures’ spirits have returned. From the Kazakh language, barsakelmes is literally translated as you will go and not return. This departure or migration could also be seen as a metaphor for the local artistic and intellectual state, the way the region’s artistic community feels, but it is also an international trait. 

The legend of Nurtole preserves echoes of an ancient initiation ritual, a rite of the commemoration of ancestors, or aruakhs (spirits). Taking its cue from this, the programme aims at a ritual purification of Tselinny’s new space with the help of the blessings of  ancestors / aruakhs through various media – art, sound, music, dance – and visual culture more broadly. This multidisciplinary approach aims to situate Tselinny as a space of desire, a shelter for art and thought; no longer a cinema but a space for performances, exhibitions and reflection.

This resynthesis and reimagining of Barsakelmes is a collaboration between the Tselinny team, Gulnur Mukazhanova, Dariya Temirkhan and Samrattama with qazaq indie. 

The opening programme also includes: an architectural exhibition of the transformation of Tselinny, From Sky to Earth: Tselinny by Asif Khan, curated by historian of art and architecture, Dr. Markus Lähteenmäki in Orta 1. 

In Atelier a project named Documentation: Imagination of Central Asia on the Map of Contemporary Art, an archival exhibition curated by Asel Rashidova exploring the Tselinny documentation project, a digital data set that collects archives of Central Asia from 1985, which invites us to remember the life of contemporary art in Central Asia at the intersection of the 1990s and 2000s, focusing on its self perception within the region and on the global, predominantly Western, art scene. Non-linear, fragmented, mobile, it conveys the simultaneous disunity and integrity of the past, creating a sense of its presence in the present.Interactive and discussion-based, it reflects the idea of ​​a database as an open platform for the joint efforts of artists and researchers to preserve and study the past.