The artist Alexey Morosov: “Yes, and who, after all, is the centaur?”

Tell me how a project like this is actually created—how does the interaction work among the three institutions: you as the artist, the Venice Biennale, and the national pavilion?

Initially, I had two parties to deal with: the Embassy of Kyrgyzstan in Italy, which serves as commissioner of the national pavilion, and the curator, Geraldine Leardi. The Biennale office comes in later, but with them you are mostly coordinating technical matters. I was barely involved in the legal side, though I occasionally had to ask about it. Everything takes a very long time—the bureaucracy operates on the principle that paperwork has to sit and wait.

From the moment I was offered the chance to represent my homeland to the moment we actually began, roughly six months passed. It was a state of complete suspension: on the one hand, everything was offered to you, and you needed to start working; on the other, nothing was settled until the document was signed.

Does the official state body have to send a letter addressed to the president of the Biennale?

Yes. In Kyrgyzstan, the authorized state body—currently the Ministry of Culture, Information, Sports and Youth Policy—sends an official letter authorizing an institution and appointing a commissioner. In this case, the commissioner was not an individual but the embassy. The ambassador then chooses the curator, and the curator chooses the artist. Our difficulty was that the application required a letter from the Ministry of Culture, and the minister had just changed. While we waited for his successor, the paperwork circulated between the Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of Culture. The country had almost no experience participating in the Biennale: last time it was the Iranian artist Firouz Farmanfarmaian’s “Gates of Turan,” so I am, in effect, the first Kyrgyz artist to represent the country.

Who is your curator, and how did you work together?

Geraldine Leardi is Italian—which is to say, someone with no connection to Kyrgyz culture at all. She began as a medieval art historian specializing in Byzantine visual culture, and now works at the Galleria Borghese in Rome, where in 2024 she published a book on its Louise Bourgeois project, “Louise Bourgeois. Unconscious Memories.”

As a medievalist, an Italian, and someone far removed from the post-Soviet world, she had to discover an entirely new one, rooted in the steppe and nomadic life. Europe knows little about what post-Soviet Central Asia actually is, and here she was, taking on a project on Tengriism, Kok-Boru, and nomads. It was essential to immerse her in the context, which is why her part in the field research—she interviewed the players and the coach—mattered so much.

She arrived on the third day of filming, which was no small undertaking: she flew from Mongolia, where she had been opening an exhibition, via Seoul to Almaty, and then on to the Talas Region, where we were shooting—three mountain passes, an altitude of almost 3,500 meters, and a six- or seven-hour drive. She rested briefly and got back to work at once.

She conducted her interviews between training sessions, when the athletes’ testosterone and adrenaline peaked—the heat, the gleam in the eyes of riders and horses alike. The match itself is brutal. This is not football or hockey: if you fall off a horse, no doctor comes running.

Talking face to face with the front end of a centaur is a strange experience—and I mean that almost literally: a centaur capable of hauling a thirty- or forty-kilo carcass around and galloping for an hour and a half. Their hands are a cross between a hydraulic press and a pair of pincers. Yet these are not MMA fighters. Kyrgyz Kok-Boru players are kind, straightforward people, despite the game’s violence.

Filming the game was harder still. The horses are large—the playing breed crosses Kyrgyz and Don stock, powerful and furious animals. They are not farm horses, nor bred for racing or parade; they are war horses that enjoy a fight. In play, together with the riders’ claw-like grip, they form a complete centauric unity, biomechanically as well, as though rider and horse shared a single neural signal.

So the film crew, the curator, and I had to shoot everything between 4:30 and 9:00 in the morning; after that, the heat becomes intense and the light unusable, and we could only resume filming between 7:00 and 9:00 in the evening. We deliberately avoided artificial light and shaped it with mirrors instead.

Filming begins. The game is under way a short distance off. The riders wrestle the carcass from one another’s hands, hanging almost to the ground, and the whole chaos of dust and fury moves across the field. At some point they get carried away and lose control altogether, and the herd starts moving toward the crew. I was almost trampled a couple of times—you feel like a medieval infantryman. I tried to shield Geraldine, but more than once the horses went straight past her. Genuine immersion.

Italians are conservative and deeply rooted in their own folk culture, which is itself fragmented and varied. They find it difficult to process anything outside familiar experience—they have enough to contend with among their own differences, where a region may have not only its own dialect but its own culture and even its own language. They know China and Japan through mass culture and cinema, but Central Asia is terra incognita. And yet this is a deep tradition whose roots reach far beyond the Middle Ages, carried today by a deindustrialized society with a low standard of living and all the charms of its infrastructure. As someone born in Kyrgyzstan, I care that my statement translates well for a European audience. But why explain when you can show? That is why I insisted she come.

How did this ultimately affect the project?

First and foremost, it is a site-specific installation. Geraldine was responsible for finding a suitable venue that responded to the project’s idea. She chose the Church of Santa Caterina in Cannaregio. A fire badly damaged it during restoration in 1977, and traces of soot remain. It is a significant site: until the First World War, one of Veronese’s most important works, “The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine,” hung here. In the apse I set up a dialogue with him, down to the pigment known as Veronese green.[1][2]

A wooden sculpture, “Temir Kazyk,” stands in the presbytery. For a nomad, the whole world turns on points of orientation. The Kyrgyz live in the mountains, but nomadic culture belongs first and foremost to the steppe—and what landmarks does the Mongolian or Kazakh steppe offer besides the sky, Tengri? Temir Kazyk is that iron stake, which we know as the Pole Star; for a nomad it is the center of the universe.[3]

In the altar space I placed a sound installation—this is where we build our microcosm. The sound designer, Zhibek Narkulova, helped me; she did a great deal for the pavilion overall and now manages it as well. We assembled the work from archival recordings and samples taken in Kyrgyzstan during the games. “Manas” is played periodically: half a million lines of verse, the longest epic in human history, longer than the Mahabharata, with Manas himself the central figure of the Kyrgyz people. Several excerpts are heard in the altar area, and the epic mentions Kok-Boru more than once.

How was it actually done? How did you create the choreography and architecture of the exhibition? What nearly went wrong, how were the works delivered, and how did the logistics work?

The architect is Paolo Bertoncini-Sabatini, a professor and architectural historian in Pisa, and a very thoughtful one. I invited him; we have been friends for years, work well together, and he understands exhibition logic exceptionally well. Beyond the creative part, there is a huge amount of installation and administrative work: laying cable, contracts, arrangements with the superintendency and the Biennale office, and he handles it all efficiently.

I always take a long time preparing an exhibition. I calculate trajectories and the routes for bringing work in; we model the venue and all its openings, where to block something off, where to let the light in. Because this is a church—a space designed to be flooded with light—we could dispense with artificial lighting almost entirely and build everything with blackout curtains.

I changed the concept four times, completely, from the first idea to the final version. I felt rather guilty toward the architect, who had to start over each time. But I wanted a solution fully resolved in exhibition logic and dramaturgy.

I designed the sculptures from the outset to come apart. Inside is an “anima,” a polystyrene core on a demountable steel frame; outside, stabilized clay. Being able to dismantle them matters, because logistics in Venice are extremely difficult. The city was built on water. It may look designed for the flâneur, but in practice it is very linear. The buildings are mostly low, yet the loaders and boatmen effectively form something that is, if not a trade union, then a cartel: they don’t undercut one another, so delivery happens at their discretion. Add the crowds of tourists that block deliveries at peak hours. Venice is a small place with monopolized contractors, and they don’t care whether your project is commercial—the rates are the same. Everything is licensed: you cannot bring your own boat; you can only use those with access and the rights. And once volume and weight exceed an ordinary boat’s capacity, you become practically untransportable. Strikes make it all the more expensive. So the city shaped the sculpture itself—what parts it is assembled from, its integrity, and, to some extent, how it looks.

And this despite having lived in Italy a long time, with transporting artworks a familiar task. I was lucky: through a friend I found a logistics company at a substantial discount, and my daughter handled the deliveries, since hiring a specialist would have been prohibitively expensive. You cannot take on the role of artist alone; you are also the producer and logistics coordinator, and you handle catering and hospitality. I would not want to do it again—it took an enormous toll on my health and my time. It is remarkable that it worked.

Tell me about BELEK. Why Kyrgyzstan, and why now? And when did you first encounter Kok-Boru?

I grew up in Kyrgyzstan; my family has roots in this land going back five generations. Kok-Boru—when I was a child, it was often translated as “goat fighting”—is a crucial part of nomadic identity, and my whole childhood and youth unfolded around it. There would always be a game going on nearby, and afterward, shashlik and celebration. It is not much integrated into urban life, but once you come into contact with pastoral and nomadic life, it is impossible to ignore.[4]

Europeans described the game long before that: the Russian anthropologist Zeland in the 1880s, the Swedish geographer Sven Hedin among the Pamir-Alai Kyrgyz in the 1890s, and two Englishwomen, Lady Macartney and Ella Sykes, who wrote about it in travel books following journeys in 1898 and 1915. But the best-known description came from Carl Gustaf Mannerheim. A colonel in the Imperial Army, he was traveling around 1906 on what was essentially a reconnaissance mission when he met Kurmanjan Datka, the “queen” of the southern Kyrgyz and the people’s real matriarch. His photographs of her with her children survive, taken barely a year before her death. Mannerheim called Kok-Boru the finest game he had ever seen and compared it to European football and polo.[5][6][7]

There were once no unified rules; people played differently from village to village. The Soviet authorities brought the game into a sporting framework—Spartakiads from the late 1940s, and from 1981 the title of Master of Sport. But it remained a rural affair, with a team for each village. Independent Kyrgyzstan drew up the current rulebook, with Bolot Shamshiev, one of the most important Kyrgyz film directors, among those involved. He loved the game and believed that the spirit of the people was dissolved in it.[8]

The whole visual sensibility of Shamshiev and that era of cinema matters to me—Gennady Bazarov, Tolomush Okeyev, the great directors. One key film of the period is Okeyev’s western “Ulan.” For me, as an artist, these are fixed points, architecturally constructed, around which the rest arranges itself. Ozu occupies the same place in Japanese cinema, and Italian neorealism belongs to the same line. Konchalovsky’s debut feature, “The First Teacher,” after Aitmatov, fits into the sequence too; it was also shot on location.[9]

It is interesting that the rules were codified not in the USSR but immediately after independence.

It went differently in each republic. In the referendum on preserving the Union, about ninety percent of the Kirghiz SSR voted in favor—nobody planned to leave. But the system’s crisis was making itself felt, and the decay was visible everywhere: you cannot lose part of the foundation and keep the structure standing. It began to be felt in earnest from 1985, with perestroika.

And there is the paradox: a republic that voted to preserve the Union sits down five years later to write its own rules for a national game. The throw into the Tai-Kazan dates from 1996, by which time the state and the era were entirely different. I think Shamshiev’s process became bound up with his contact with the players, and that shaped the creation of the professional league. A nation assembles itself this way too.

I chose Kok-Boru for my video for a reason: I think Shamshiev was right. The Kyrgyz are one of the few peoples who have kept a local identity—not simply Turkic, but specifically Kyrgyz. The social contract rests on it, too: “jeti ata,” seven fathers. You are obliged to remember your ancestors seven generations back, just as you must think seven generations forward. An ancestor’s reputation affects your place at the common table, so you think about those who come after. It is a powerful mechanism of discipline.[10]

Where does the centaur come from—human, horse, and machine all at once?

When you watch a Kok-Boru player, you see a man fuse with his horse; the signal runs the length of the spine, from one end to the other. “Tulpar” is the legendary winged steed that moves between earth and sky, and while we were working on the exhibition, we coined a neologism: “tulpar-batyr”—horse plus warrior. That is what we called the statues: a Scythian-Hunnic, Turkic centaur, not a Greek one.

I also reflect on the sculptural dimension. With “Pontifex Maximvs,” I was already moving toward a rethinking of sculpture, and part of that concerns how a person merges with a machine—less a thesis than a driving impulse. As an artist, I am interested in finding a new formal language, the way science-fiction writers do, modeling stages and reinventing them for the contemporary person, and for the person who will be here in thirty or forty years.[11]

But science fiction never really asks what the society of the future will look like; it asks what the present actually is—still industry, or already something else. We are entering the era of additive technologies, maximum automation, and removing human beings from the lower tiers of production. So I borrow the language of contemporary industrial design, which is often itself the product of AI or algorithmic work. The result is a hybrid: an Upper Paleolithic or Neolithic sculpture, a marker of steppe culture, crossed with twenty-first-century industrial design built on Bézier curves.

Interestingly, the horse, though a universal image, carries different meanings: among the Celts, chaos; among the Romans, order.

There is a historical vertical here too: the northernmost point of Alexander the Great’s campaign was the Arshanbuk gorge in the Jalal-Abad Region. And Alexander was an inspiration to Genghis Khan, who wanted to outdo his anabasis—except that Alexander’s moved from west to east, and this one runs the other way and on a far greater scale: 2,000 horsemen for Alexander against an estimated 60,000 to 160,000 for Genghis Khan, with two or three horses each. Baron Ungern later “cosplayed” the same role. And who, after all, is the centaur, if not the nomad the ancient Greeks encountered?[12]

This is exactly where I brought such distant things together—the aesthetics of nomadism and the steppe with the great Mediterranean tradition. It is why I chose slow motion in the video, filming not only Kok-Boru but the dams: I wanted the ontological sensation of monumental relief, an “classical field.”

Another rhyme matters to me here. The origins of the Doric order are often traced to wooden architecture—the metopes, triglyphs, and guttae explained through the language of timber construction, the tectonics of wood. Set the monumentality of the Parthenon metopes against their centauromachy. And then set the dams beside them, with Lenin’s head: our Atlantis, our antiquity, the land of giants and Cyclopes that the Greeks of Homer’s age encountered after losing so much knowledge and culture in the Bronze Age collapse.[13]

Tell me about the water line—the dams and hydroelectric power stations.

You arrive and realize this is a Cyclopean civilization. It doesn’t even read as something from the 1970s; it feels six or seven thousand years old—a complete sense of Luxor, Karnak, Cusco, something utterly primordial. Gidroproekt, the Tashkent branch of the Leningrad institute, mostly designed it.

Formally, it is not even architecture but an engineering structure, yet it is architecturally beautiful—especially the Toktogul Hydroelectric Power Station. I do not understand how they designed it without 3D modeling systems: multidirectional formwork, concrete of extraordinary quality, cast along unimaginable third-degree curves.[14]

We had access to all the dams. This is the supreme pathos of the left-wing socialist project: an absolutely utilitarian structure decorated with a “metastasis” of Soviet Hellenism—and therefore it looks completely extraterrestrial.

We brought in two local scholars from Kyrgyzstan: Cholpon Turdalieva, a professor at the American University of Central Asia, served as an anthropological consultant; Dilbara Osmonbetova, a Candidate of Geographical Sciences and associate professor at Balasagyn Kyrgyz National University, advised on water-resource management and transboundary water policy.

Glaciers are shrinking before our eyes; compared with the 1980s, they have lost a significant portion of their volume. The rivers are fed mainly by seasonal snow, and precipitation is scarce. The process has been under way since 1986, and the spillway was last opened some seven years ago.[15]

But I didn’t want an ordinary, speculative ecology project. You can make a career out of water scarcity indefinitely. Now the issue has become even more acute, including because of Afghanistan. All this infrastructure is wearing out, the population is growing, and agricultural technologies aren’t developing as quickly as we would like. The Afghans are building the Qosh Tepa Canal, which takes water from the Amu Darya. This does not directly concern us; we are in a different basin, on the Naryn and Syr Darya. But the region is interconnected by water as a whole: what is taken from the Amu Darya shifts the burden onto everyone else. For collective security, the situation is extremely difficult.

You usually work with bronze and marble. Why clay here? And, in general, how did the project change your understanding of sculpture?

I work with bronze constantly and have a great many bronze pieces, but that is a gallery format, and it requires serious investment. Here it is raw clay—terra cruda, adobe—the material of the Neolithic Revolution. Dried in the sun, in a dry climate without rain, clay holds up. In humid Venice it really does “fear” the city and turns peculiarly fragile. Bronze would not have worked here even technically: prohibitive weight, “a heavy conversation” with the loaders, an entirely different budget. The choice of adobe belongs to that same production romance with Venice. Poplar was used for the wooden piece—an excellent wood to work with, and one I knew from my student days.

Lately I have developed a kind of resistance to the traditional technological process in sculpture, because of the “kolkhozification” of culture and the influx of enormous amounts of money. Anyone can become a contemporary artist, buy industrial-grade equipment, and hire assistants. This raises the question of what the artist actually does. And it turns out that the artist is the person who asks what is specifically artistic in a work—as opposed to industrial, technological, commercial, or recreational.

I like to think I understand how my work will develop from here. I have a kind of metaverse in clay, with its own protagonists and antagonists, a world history, and characters who move from project to project and take up their roles. Broadly, it is a trilogy: “Pontifex Maximvs,” then “Exodus,” then “Manuport”—and BELEK brings me to the beginning of that third part. I have a rough idea of where these sculptures will be shown over the next three or four years, but I would rather not say until the contracts are in place.[16][17]

And what is sculpture to you today?

Sculpture is not simply a medium. Within the artistic continuum, any three-dimensional object is sculpture, but not every object is art. Sculpture has its own internal laws, as symphonic music does. The question you ask is central to the contemporary sculptor-artist. First and foremost, it is formal selection and image. Even an extremely precise optical copy of a person, obtained through scanning and coordinate processing, does not make the object a sculpture.

In this project, the media work like a symphony: a demountable wooden sculpture, painting, 8K video and sound installation, clay sculptures inside and outside the church. The work begins outside the framework of flat visual perception, yet the gallery and the catalog ultimately appropriate it—raising a whole set of questions I have not resolved. I am interested in inventing, at least for myself, a visuality, a language answerable to how a contemporary person sees.

And here is the question. Take slow motion, which the late Bill Viola used: is it video or sculpture? We brought in two RED cameras and shot in 8K at 200 frames per second, something that once would have been impossible. Slow motion here is the athlete’s inner optics—adrenaline gives you a different sense of time, and time stops. So what is the difference between a figure of pathos in video art and the same figure in sculpture?

Sculpture is the same stopping of time. Pasolini’s vision is one of my references, but he did not have the technical means to shoot and reproduce it as we can now.[18]

Kok-Boru is a goat carcass, real blood, and violence. Aren’t you sterilizing the violence by turning the carcass into a beautiful metaphor?

Look, this is not violence within the conceptual framework of contemporary art; it is part of intangible heritage. The carcass weighs thirty to forty kilograms, and you have to carry it one-handed while staying on the horse and fighting to keep it. We have already talked about the players’ hands.

We won’t judge an Inuit for hunting a whale. Both you and I are products of the “big world,” of Christian Europe. But for a nomad, the horse is a friend, transportation, and food all at once, while the goat is simply food.

There is an element of substitution at work—the goat stands in for the wolf. But everything is eaten after the game; this is not entertainment for a satiated mind. In Kyrgyzstan, animals are slaughtered every day, and slaughtered with respect: the moment the animal is killed, it’s practically lunch already. Where Girard’s scapegoat was loaded with the year’s sins and driven into the wilderness to preserve social peace, among the Kyrgyz a goat is a goat.

I like this laconic quality in nomadic culture. Nomads are much closer to the original human design, to the factory settings. The nomadic conception is as far as possible from an aesthetics of accumulated objects, and even from the allegorical reading of the world that settled Christian societies practice.

What do you think about the way contemporary art, instead of returning to the subject, proposes tribalism and coercion toward sociality?

Thematically, this leads back to Cain and Abel. Abel is the nomad; Cain earns his bread by the sweat of his brow through agriculture. It echoes the Gospel story of Martha and Mary: Martha busies herself with the household, while the better part belongs to the other choice.[19] Gordon Childe, who coined the term “Neolithic Revolution,” has interesting things to say about how settled life changes human beings.

Modern society is neurosis. You multiply your needs. But take a hypothetical Kyrgyz person who “lives as his ancestors did”: he has everything—the best food, the best sky, children nearby, leisure time. Why would he sell everything and move to the city?

You have opportunities; not everyone can boast of monuments in Rome and Moscow.

The artist’s ambitions went into those, yes. But I have no desire to fill the world with my sculptures; in that sense I am entirely unambitious. What matters more is that what I make should not become a weight on my children after I am gone. There are plenty of examples—families, descendants of artists who won gold medals in Paris and Venice, with the canvases lying rolled up and wanted by nobody. Someone throws them out and forgets: he was around, and now he is not. But if you raised your children with love, they will try to do something with the work out of respect for your memory—and that is why it matters that it be salable rather than a burden hanging over them.

This interview was originally published in Russian by the independent webzine SPECTATE in August 2026.