Kandis Friesen

Karaganda, Karaganda

Kandis Friesen’s project Karaganda, Karaganda is anchored in the slow dissolution of the remnants of Karlag, a former Soviet gulag in Karaganda, Kazakhstan. Working through site-based research and expanded modes of video essay, the project is shaped by exilic grammars—of dispersal, dislocation, and disrepair. While an official museum now exists, most of the gulag remains unmarked, its histories circulating through unofficial means: oral histories, song, self-organized micromuseums, architectural reuse, non-ruinous ruins, and over a dozen unmarked mass graves, preserved mainly through word-of-mouth. Organized as loose chapters, the project builds montaged frameworks of monumental memory, grafted onto the site’s ruinous forms. It emerges from the concept of diasporic site-specificity, where diasporic logics and exilic grammars produce a poetic and spatial knowledge, composed somewhere between the solidity of official memory and the dispersal of intimate, unofficial forms. The circulation of coal and song are a central anchor: how they each carry material and ephemeral gulag histories into the present, while also sharing the circulatory path of the lungs and breath, both covertly carried in the body over many years. This correlation—between inside and outside, the legible and the opaque, the unknown and knowing-how-not-to-know—maintains a tethered continuity with the gulag’s unmarked mass graves. Structured as an expanded video essay, Karaganda, Karaganda is a longterm project, unfolding through iterative and interrelated works: in exhibition, publication, walks, workshops, screenings, and site-specific forms, and in collaboration with artists, curators, residents, and historians working with Karlag’s legacies.

Text: Kandis Friesen