Lighting The Same Fire

The Khazars, a multiconfessional kingdom related to the artist’s ancestry are invoked in this project as exemplary of both the biggest and most influential Jewish polity in history, as well as its multi-ethnic and multi-religious tolerance, without parallel in history. They originated in nomadic tribes worshipping the titular sky god Tengri. Without a clear center or a major city found to date, their structures of culture and politics traversed the Eurasian steppe in alternative, unknowable, un-sense-able, non-Western ways.

"The actual beginnings of our expression are post Western (just as they certainly are pre-western). It is only necessary that we arm ourselves with complete self knowledge the whole technology (which is after all just expression of who ever) will change to reflect the essence of a freed people. Freed of an oppressor, but also as Touré has reminded we must be “free from the oppressor’s spirit,” as well. It is this spirit as emotional construct that can manifest as expression as art or technology or any form." Technology & Ethos, Amiri Baraka 

Energy is the common denominator of form. Through this lens, forms of all kinds, from sun amulets to urban layouts, emerge not as static material assemblages but as configurations of energy. Following Cara Daggett, energy here is understood not merely as a physical quantity but as a political concept, a way of organizing labor, bodies, nature, and power. Yet energy also exceeds its modern framing: it is a substrate to which diverse practices and relations have always existed, cosmological, ritualistic, artisanal, metabolic, most of which precede and overflow the thermodynamic imagination.

What history remains buried in these cultures that moved from place to place, who did not leave a mark in a particular location? Can we account for some knowledge of civilizations buried not within seemingly stable materials or historical remains but rather in the energy those cultures worshipped, utilized, and harnessed?

My last name, Astarhan, is spelled differently between me, my brothers, and my father. Even the Hebrew spelling differs among different parts of the family. The experience of immigration is thus forever engraved onto our identification cards and our passports. We are a mini diaspora, carrying a sign of displacement in our pockets.   But in all its different spellings, the family name is the name of a place.

Family names sometimes describe someone who came from somewhere. Therefore, it is possible that someone from my family came back from the city of Astrakhan in southern Russia, by the Persian border. It is also possible to read into the name by its meaning. “Khan” is a historic title referring to a chief, king, or ruler, originating among nomadic tribes in the Central and Eastern Eurasian Steppe. But Khan is also a type of inn once found in the Middle East and parts of North Africa and Central Asia that effectively functioned as a trading center and hostel.  A star khan. Am I the star king?  Do I have a shelter under the stars?

A technology of hope, the device conjures and embodies Khazar techniques, images, and practices, to reclaim the culture’s place in the history of the Jewish people, and to learn how to re-remember the inter-religious tolerance practiced throughout the kingdom.

The capital of Khazaria is thought to be the city of Atil. Situated at the delta of the Volga river, most of the archeological findings related to its assumed location and culture are buried deep under river mud, never to be found, making Atil a modern Atlantis. Until recently, a new candidate for Atil's location has emerged. It's Semibugry, a large Khazar-era city that was discovered in 2019 by researchers from Astrakhan.

In his book The Reconditioned Inspiration, Pesach Salvosky advised the young artist: “Establish yourself in the right dimensions in order to go into the picture you have created. Observe, that inside the picture, there is a universe.”

I create a picture. At the front of the picture I draw speculative history, a re-figuring of an origin story. The diagram of a dialogue. A paradox. A belief crisis. Far in the background, I paint a circular city on an island over a swampy ditch in the middle of the city of Atil. The city's outskirts extend almost to the edges of the picture, separated from it by a thin stroke of desert.  I establish myself in the right dimensions. I go into it.