Furqat Palvan-Zade
I am interested in the global history of Central Asian technology and media, as well as late Soviet artistic and literary production. Currently, I am working on a number of research papers focusing on the history of electrification in the Tashkent region in the 1930s, late-Soviet socialist realist painting, and environmentalist and traditionalist discourse in film and architecture in the 1980s. One of these projects, I hope, will eventually lead me to a dissertation project.
Apart from my academic research, I am engaged in editorial work, filmmaking, and artistic practice. In 2022, I received a Master of Fine Art degree from Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam, where I was part of an experimental program focused on the translation of archival research into an art project as well as the correlations between truth and fiction. My art projects were presented at the Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile in Hong Kong and the Venice Biennale. In 2023, my works were shown at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and the 14th Shanghai Biennale.
Since 2014, I have been working on the syg.ma platform, a self-organized publication and community of authors from Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Since 2020, I’ve been leading the EastEast project (published both online and in print in English, Arabic, and Russian) as its editor-in-chief.
Research interests:
– history of media and technology
– nationalisms in Central Eurasia
– the fact-fiction dichotomy in film
– history of contemporary art in Central Eurasia