Always Already Here:
On Decolonial Practice and Collective Belonging in Saodat Ismailova's Chilltan, documenta fifteen, 2022
By Maria Neff
In the summer of 2022, I travelled to Kassel for the first time. I was a twenty-two-year-old art history student making the journey specifically to see the art from Central Asia presented at documenta fifteen. That fifteenth edition of documenta was curated by the Indonesian collective Ruangrupa, who structured the exhibition around the concept of lumbung. In Indonesian rural communities, a lumbung is a communal rice barn where surplus harvest is stored and later distributed according to collectively determined criteria.1 Ruangrupa translated this agricultural and social model into a curatorial methodology, proposing lumbung as a framework for interdisciplinary collaboration, resource sharing, and community-oriented modes of working.
Responding directly to the curatorial premise, the Uzbek contemporary artist and filmmaker Saodat Ismailova initiated the research collective DAVRA upon her invitation to participate in documenta fifteen. DAVRA articulated its mission as one “to connect and develop the Central Asian art scene by fostering dynamic exchanges of experiences and knowledge within the region as a priority.”2 Upon the initiation of the DAVRA research collective, nineteen cultural practitioners were subsequently invited to contribute to documenta fifteen.3
And it was remarkable and deeply inspiring to see how the curatorial proposal of lumbung was embodied by the Central Asian art collective. Collectivity functioned as an organisational framework. It shaped the collective curatorial approach, visible in the formation of the DAVRA group and in the invitation extended to other artists and cultural practitioners to jointly present artistic practices and research from and about the region. Collectivity was also present in the mode of production itself, where hierarchies within the working process were largely absent. It became the ground for horizontal modes of inquiry and for the sharing of knowledge, experiences, and histories that coexisted and was also a force that shaped their artistic inquiries and became visible within the works themselves. It was tangible in the performances, which invited – and at times seemed to expect – the participation of viewers and other Central Asian colleagues. It was visible in the performances that reenacted gestures of care; the attentiveness toward one another in the re-creation and embodiment of a community. This sense of communal belonging, however, was not limited to interpersonal relations: it radiated outward into landscape, climate, and the broader web of living presences that constitute a region. The individual appeared embedded in ecological cycles and seasonal rhythms, and as belonging to a regional history rather than an isolated personal narrative.
In this sense, the artistic and curatorial work presented by DAVRA and Saodat Ismailova carries considerable force, revealing the potential of collectivity as a living and working principle: an inherently decolonial gesture, as argued by the decolonial thinker Madina Tlostanova – whose framework of communal worlding and decolonial practice in Central Asia substantially informs my observations that follow – that seeks to generate forms of interaction and collective creation rooted in the histories and cultures of the region.4 Within this relational framework, three performances emerge as especially compelling instances of these ideas in practice.
It would be impossible to discuss documenta fifteen without acknowledging the significant public controversy that arose shortly after the exhibition opened. This controversy surrounded the discovery and subsequent removal of the work “People’s Justice” by the Indonesian collective Taring Padi, which depicted the political violence of the Suharto regime but was found to contain two antisemitic figures. While recognising them, this text does not seek to engage directly with the broader discussion of documenta fifteen. Rather, its aim is to highlight the work of the Central Asian collective DAVRA and of Saodat Ismailova, and to foreground these important voices within contemporary art.5
Summer chilla
Saodat Ismailova, together with the curatorial team and the invited artists and researchers, produced a forty-one-day public programme called Chilltan. In Central Asian traditions, the term chilltan – derived from Persian, meaning ‘forty bodies’ or ‘forty beings’ – refers to protective spirits that may appear as humans, animals, elemental forces, or natural phenomena.6 The programme’s duration would coincide with chilla, or the forty hottest days of Central Asian summer, which provided the frame for the creation of the chillahona (literally a room for chilla), which served as a gathering space for the chilltans.
Fig. 1. Summer Chilla, documenta fifteen, Kassel, 2022. Installation view.
In the dimmed and quiet basement of Kassel’s Fridericianum (see Fig. 1), nineteen artists and researchers reflected on this tradition and its mythology together and, in this way, became embodiments of chilltan. More broadly, they were given space to present their artistic work within the wider context of decolonial inquiry of the region. These explorations were pursued through the mediums of film, performance, conversation, and installations. They also took the form of a publication titled Chilltan. Shapeshifting eternal spirits from Central Asia, which assembled artistic work and academic research on the practice of the collective DAVRA, as well as reflections on what it means to engage with traditions such as chilltan. Every day during the public programme, various works by the invited participants were shared. Each day featured at least four or five events or performances, held during the summer chilla.
Descending into the space for chilla in the Fridericianum’s basement that summer felt like slipping beneath a heated surface. The air turned cool and quiet, and time, which had been pressing so insistently above ground, where the just-opened documenta fifteen bustled with visitors, seemed to loosen its grip. No longer exposed to the demanding brightness of the sun, the darker rooms of the basement allowed one to turn one’s attention toward the art that was at the center of the spatial arrangement.
Fig. 2. Saodat Ismailova, Chilltan #2, documenta fifiteen, Kassel, 2022. Installation view.
At the entrance to this chillahona, visitors first encountered Saodat Ismailova’s video installation the Chilltan #2 – a muted projection onto several thin layers of silk (see Fig. 2). I remember being so captivated by the elusive, soft shells of the silk upon entering the chillahona. On these foldings appeared female faces, some with their eyes closed, some open, some wearing braids, some not. The faces were multiplied and layered over one another, executing an ethereal footage, as if it was welcoming the visitors to encounter for the first time the forty-bodied spirit of chilltan. As Ismailova notes herself:
„One of their [the chilltan] notable manifestations is qyrq qyz or chill dukhtaron – translated from Persian and Turkic languages as forty girls. Their presence is found in local epic stories, tales, and the toponymy of sacred sites scattered across the region. This imagery evokes the matrilineal transmission of knowledge that is integral to the region's immaterial heritage.“7
After passing by the soft, airy layers of Ismailova’s work, I entered the main chamber, marked by the presence of a round, wooden table. The table was low, surrounded by colourful velvet cushions called körpe. Anyone familiar with Central Asian household settings would have felt immediately at home. From this chamber, an entrance led to a second room with a screen for the extensive programme, which included video art, film, and music performances, but also served as a space for public discussions and dance performances.
The spatial layers of the basement mirrored the programme’s structure. Ismailova’s work offered an inviting point of entry, its imaginary chilltan gesturing toward the exhibition’s conceptual frame. Beyond this, a space for communal gathering opened around the table in the main chamber, which became the center of practice for the invited embodiments of chilltan. Here, the round table served as the central site for performances and talks organised by the invited artists and researchers. As it is not possible to describe every performance or event within the scope of this essay, I will focus on three happenings of the programme that closely reflect the ideas of communal creation and worlding.8
Fig. 3. Nazira Karimi, Maïdabofi, documenta fifteen, Kassel, 2022. Installation view. Photo by Aïda Adilbek. © Nazira Karimi. Courtesy of the artist.
On the 13th of July, the nineteenth day of the programme, the artist Nazira Karimi presented Maïdabofi: a durational performance with a magnetic, somatic pull. Karimi, a contemporary artist and filmmaker born in Tajikistan and a member of the DAVRA collective, brought together six performers, among them DAVRA artists and curators themselves, who sat together on a red velvet körpe dressed in black.9 Sitting in a circle with their hair undone, the women began to braid each other’s hair into many thin braids (Fig. 3). Then, with gentle movements, they mimicked the act of braiding, while also running their palms across the hair. The word maïdabofi, created by parts as maïda – small, and boftan – to braid, means this process of braiding women’s hair in forty braids.10
The movement was slow and with intention. Over time, the hair filled with beautiful braids, each woman taking her turn to braid another’s hair, gently holding the strands. The performance had no temporal limitations, continuing only as long as the act of braiding itself required. The act was innately social and relational, evoking in these movements an image of care. In the artist’s reflection of the performance, she states:
„Maïdabofi is about womanhood. Working in the collective of Central Asian female artists I find myself back in my childhood, growing up surrounded by women/chilltans of my mahalla. Davra became my new mahalla, chilltans, a community, where everyone is sharing and caring.“11
Another performance I want to draw attention to was 40 Mirrors by the artist Dana Iskakova (Fig. 4 and 5). On the 3rd of August, the thirty-fifth day of the programme, Iskakova distributed round metal discs – unpolished mirrors – across the round table, giving each participant a cloth with which they could methodically wipe and polish the surface. It was open to the visitors to take a mirror and polish together with the other curious viewers and invited artists, to softly render the surface of the metal discs. This process of polishing, the shared repetitive movement within the performance, reflected the gesture of collective, monotonous labour. With time, this tedious task of cleaning revealed the metal’s shine and one’s own reflection in the mirror’s surface. The glossiness and the act itself invited each participant to look into this object, to play with the brushed, smoky vision emerging through the surface.
Fig. 4. & Fig 5. Dana Iskakova, 40 Mirrors, documenta fifteen, Kassel, 2022. Installation view
Described as a collective happening, the performance corresponded directly to the imagination of chilltan. In some readings of this tradition, as Iskakova shared, chilltan could also be „people living earthly life.“12 Yet because the chilltan do not have a fixed identity, Iskakova inscribed the spirits into the materiality of the metal, hence the blurring of boundaries between the human gazing into the mirror and the spirit dwelling within its reflective world. In Iskakova’s words, it was an invitation to come and see where these spirits might be, to see what lies on the other side of the mirror, the otherworldly image hiding beneath. In the multiplicity of these round metal mirrors, the embodiment of the tradition of the number forty coalesced with the many participants playing with and holding these objects in their hands. Have the chilltan entered us, embodied through those participating in the performative act? Are they among the participants? Are they already here, or were they always here, lurking somewhere invisible?
Fig. 6. Nazilya Nagimova, Wool carding performance, documenta fifteen, Kassel, 2022. Installation view.
The last performance I would like to describe is by the artist Nazilya Nagimova, her Wool carding performance (see Fig. 6). On 25 July, the thirty-first day of the exhibition, the Tatar artist presented her work across two halls, one featuring the performance of carding a large heap of wool, and in the other her participatory installation called Jort. This installation was a transportable house in the shape of a snail shell, constructed from felted wool as a recreation of the traditional Tatar jort (yurt). This portable felt house served as both a functional shelter and an embodiment of ancestral nomadic practice, with the snail form emphasising the concept of carrying one’s home. The work continued her engagement with her personal Tatar family history, where as a child she learned the process of working wool from her grandparents’ sheep into felt rugs, a practice which was later abandoned by the family.13 The Wool carding performance could be seen as a continuation of that lost practice, the process of working with wool to make felt. And so Nagimova sat in one of the halls, between two large piles of wool – one uncarded and the other gradually taking shape – as she drew her hands through the fibre, smoothing and quietly composing it. Seeing the artists seated before two soft piles of wool felt deeply disarming and soothing. The performance was open to any viewer to take part in this process. Visitors would walk past the gentle presence of the artist and slowly pause to watch the fibres being transformed into a material that promised warmth, and perhaps even suggested a sense of shelter.
The magic of joint creativity
In all of these performances, with their different approaches, stories, and aims, one principle emerges as the foundation of this artistic programme, a thread weaving together these performances: The principles of collectivity and relationality. They become manifest in the participatory approach within each performance, in the open engagement between viewers, participants, and artists, but also in the curatorial decision to bring together different artists in the region to work collectively in a non-hierarchical mode.14 But collectivity here also suggests something broader – a connectedness within a region, an engagement with cultural traditions which place each specific performance into the larger context of historical regional practice. The work operates across scales, from the gestures of performative practice to the wider understanding of oneself as part of a relational ecosystem.
I see it in Nazira Karimi’s performance Maïdabofi, where braiding each other’s hair recreates the mahalla, the community where care becomes the means of sustaining both individuals and the collective. In Dana Iskakova’s performance 40 Mirrors, it appears in the reflection of collective labour through the monotonous polishing of the metal discs, but also in the engagement with the spiritual tradition of chilltan, which suggests a historical continuity to the practices of the region that finds its embodiment in the active looking for the chilltan in the blurry metal mirrors. And in Nazilya Nagimova’s performance of wool carding, where the artist brushed through the fibres of wool, connecting her personal story of lost cultural connection to the felt-making traditions, threading the string from her as a singular person to a larger community through the quiet, repetitive gestures of ancestral labour.
And within this principle lies something deeply powerful: a mode that is simultaneously affective and imaginative, gentle and full of care and attentiveness toward one another. This observation appears central to Madina Tlostanova’s analysis of the public programme. The decolonial thinker and researcher, who also contributed to the publication Chilltan (2022) as part of the programme, notes that:
„[...] the collectivity presents as immanent to the artistic practice of this group, a way of working and being. Davra strives to reimagine in contemporary conditions the magic of the joint creativity [and knowledge production]. The key word here is ‘joint’ because it is this togetherness that is lacking in the modern subject who is infected by the normalized ideas of individualism that tainted not only in economy but also art and culture.“15
This commentary offers a crucial reading of the practice, as Tlostanova provides an example of a practice counter to the „normalized ideas of individualism.“16 Within this commentary lies not only a recognition of a powerful artistic gesture, but also the reason this specific approach to artistic practice holds important critical potential.
Tlostanova suggests that one of the conditions to which the project responds is the profound alienation produced by modernity.17 She notes that, over the last several centuries, modern thought has increasingly organised the world through a series of dichotomies – between subject and object, human and nonhuman life, nature and culture, science and myth, or tradition and modernity – such divisions that have gradually separated individuals from the wider networks of relations that once connected them to the environment and to one another.18 Following Tlostanova’s reading, the members of DAVRA nevertheless seek ways to reconnect with other forms of world-making that survive in cultural memory. By turning toward the voices, images, and practices of their ancestors, they attempt, in her account, to mend disrupted historical continuities and restore links with forgotten cosmologies. Where these connections have been irretrievably lost, Tlostanova suggests, artistic practice becomes a means of imaginative reconstruction, allowing new narratives to emerge in the gaps left by fractured histories.19 In this sense, the project strives to resurrect what Tlostanova describes as “the all-penetrating communal element of Central Asian cosmology, ethics, and everyday economy, the mutual aid principle evident on all levels of social relations.”20 Such values expressed, among other traditions, “specific phenomena of regular women’s meetings combining sacred and mundane activities, for example, making clothes for the dowry or specific ritual food and shamanistic magic rituals such as exorcism or calling for the rain.”21 Among these traditions is also the practice of engaging with the chilltan.
In the context of the three performances discussed here, attention turns to gestures that might at first glance appear routine: the braiding of one another’s hair, the act of brushing through heaps of wool, the repetitive movements of daily maintenance and care, or the reaching out to the chilltan. By foregrounding such gestures, the works reveal their dual nature as simultaneously mundane, ritualistic, and sacred, reconnecting – through artistic and imaginative means – with cultural traditions of Central Asia. As Tlostanova notes, the demonology of chilltan recalls a time when humans „were not separated and alienated from the world, […] [and] each other, when they existed in a cosmic and moral equilibrium.“22 In such a cosmology, she writes, “the sphere of individual’s private life and their good and evil acts” was not divided from “the community, the land in all its multiple overtones, and the universe.”23
In this sense, the emphasis on collectivity within this artistic project acquires a particular urgency in the context of contemporary capitalist societies, which tend to privilege individual achievement, competition, and self-sufficiency over shared forms of life. Against this logic, the collective gestures enacted within the programme propose another way of imagining social relations, which are grounded in care and mutual responsibility. By gathering artists and participants around shared rituals, gestures of maintenance, and acts of collective reflection, the project gestures toward forms of belonging that resist the atomising tendencies of modern individualism. Collectivity here reminds us that other ways of being together remain possible, even within the conditions of a globalised and capitalist present. The practices unfolding within this project open a space for imagining forms of social life capable of countering the many forms of alienation that structure the contemporary world.
Sensing other worlds
Alongside the principle of relationality within social structures and communities, another principle emerges: the sensing of other worlds through the interweaving of artistic practice with multiple ecologies. This sensitivity becomes visible both in the ecological awareness within the artistic projects and in an attentiveness to other ecologies of attention, grounded in the regional temporality of a chillahona.
The principle of relationality manifests, first, in an attention to more-than-human ecologies, as reflected in Nazilya Nagimova’s performance. Her work renders visible how human-animal connection has been crucial for collective survival through embodied ritual. The performance centers on the brushing of wool. The movement is repetitive, almost hypnotic in its deliberate slowness. The hand passes through the fibres again and again, teasing apart tangles, aligning what was disordered. There is something both meditative and generative in this labour, a tactile interaction between human hands and the fibre that comes from the animal body. Through such gestures of care and reciprocity that acknowledge the entanglement of human bodies with other living systems, the performance articulates a cosmology in which the human is intertwined with larger ecologies. Nagimova’s work demonstrates how artistic practice can extend beyond anthropocentric concerns, engaging with the vital materialities and agencies that exceed the human realm.
This ecological sensibility appears equally in the programme’s broader temporal structure. The framework of forty days references the summer chilla, the hottest forty-day period in the Central Asian calendar, thereby aligning the exhibition’s duration with natural rhythms and seasonal transformations. In this way, the very temporality becomes an acknowledgment of participation within broader ecosystems, a recognition that artistic practice unfolds not in abstract time but within the pulse of environmental and climatic patterns that shape life in the region. Madina Tlostanova argues that
„[...] the quadragintary division is a frame for most customs, seasonal events, human actions, and ages in Central Asia - the forty-day fasting and forty-day vows of silence, the forty-day seclusion of the mother and the newly born baby and of the newlyweds to avoid the evil eye and bewitching, and the belief that after forty days the soul of the deceased leaves the earth for good.“24
This “quadragintary division”25 structures the annual cycle, manifesting in the forty coldest winter days set against the forty hottest summer days. During the latter period, the summer chilla, pious practitioners – and particularly Sufis – withdraw into dedicated spaces known as chillahona for prayer and fasting, while the wider community responds by scaling back labour and activity until temperatures relent.26
This temporal logic shapes not only the conceptual framework, but also the visceral experience of the exhibition environment, influencing how one engages with the art. As described above, the descent into the basement unfolds as a passage into an austere, mythically resonant chillahona. The chillahona proposes a place where ordinary perception is suspended, where one’s gaze turns inward toward reflection while remaining open to encounter with art in its multiple manifestations. The ritualistic quality of the performances, their deliberate slowness and intentionality, transforms the space into a site for aesthetic contemplation and a sanctuary for consciously decelerated attention: attention directed both inward, through observance and intentional participation within the performative practices, and outward, toward wider ecological and relational systems.
Four years after
Four years have passed since documenta fifteen and the summer chilla curated by the artistic collective DAVRA, convened by Saodat Ismailova. In that time, the landscape of Central Asian contemporary art has begun to shift. In 2025, the Almaty Museum of Arts, the Centre for Contemporary Culture Tselinny, and the first Bukhara Biennial in Uzbekistan were established, each marking a new chapter for the region's cultural scene. For the Central Asian artistic community, the emergence of these large institutions signals the possibility that contemporary artistic practices will gain sustained visibility and continuous support. For the broader artistic community, this opens a space to encounter more closely the rich artistic practices of the region.
In retrospect, the participation of Central Asian artists in documenta fifteen in 2022 embodied precisely this possibility of encounter. What made the project particularly resonant was the cumulative effect of the artistic programme: Nazira Karimi’s performance creating mahalla through intimate gestures of care, Dana Iskakova’s mirrors channeling the chilltan, Nazilya Nagimova’s patient hands connecting personal history to collective memory through ancestral labour. What the summer chilla demonstrated so vulnerably and powerfully was not simply a set of artistic works, but an entire cosmology of making, one grounded in regional histories, collectivity, and relationality, attuned to seasonal rhythms, and attentive to the interweaving of human and non-human worlds.
The chilltan were always here. What the exhibition accomplished was making space where they – and we – might briefly become visible to one another.
Maria Neff (b. 2000, Almaty, Kazakhstan) is currently pursuing an M.A. in the History of Art at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and is currently employed as a student research assistant at the Centre for Advanced Study inherit. heritage in transformation, Käte Hamburger Kolleg based at Humboldt University Berlin. She previously completed a B.A. in Art and Visual History and Philosophy at the same university, and studied Philosophy of Aesthetics and History of Art at the University of Edinburgh. Her research explores how contemporary art in Central Asia navigates the conditions of postcoloniality, and how performative and decolonial gestures give rise to new epistemic frameworks and modes of artistic production.
1. “About,” Documenta Fifteen, accessed January 13, 2026,
https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/about/.
2. “About,” Davra, accessed January 15, 2026, https://davra.ca/about. It should be noted that although the curatorial work was carried out collectively by the artistic collective DAVRA, Dilda Ramazan is specifically credited as the curator of the artistic programme, see “Chilltan. Summer Chilla,” Davra, accessed February 10, 2026, https://davra.ca/creating/chilltan-summer-chilla.
3. For the full list of participants, please refer to “Davra Community,” Davra, accessed February 10, 2026, https://davra.ca/community.
4. This particular notion will be discussed further below. See also, Madina Tlostanova, “The movement of a hand as a whole. Central Asian “Davra” as a process of communal learning/healing/worlding,” in Chilltan. Shapeshifting eternal spirits from Central Asia. A compilation of images and words responding to syncretic female spirits rooted on shamanic, zoroastrian, buddhist and muslim beliefs, ed. DAVRA research group (Documenta fifteen, 2022), 47.
5. I highly recommend reading the reflection by Mi You, “What Politics? What Aesthetics?: Reflections on documenta fifteen,” e-flux 131 (2022), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/131/501112/what-politics-what-aesthetics-reflections-on-documenta-fifteen. Furthermore, I include a link to the statement by the collective Ruangrupa: “Statement on Accusations of Antisemitism Against Documenta Fifteen,” Documenta Fifteen, accessed January 10, 2026, https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/news/statement-on-accusations-of-antisemitism/. I also link the statement of the art collective Taring Padi: “Statement by Taring Padi on Dismantling ‘People’s Justice’,” Documenta Fifteen, accessed January 10, 2026, https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/news/statement-by-taring-padi-on-dismantling-peoples-justice/.
For German readers, I recommend reading the executive summary of documenta fifteen, Gremium zur fachwissenschaftlichen Begleitung der documenta fifteen, Abschlussbericht (2023), https://documenta.de/media/pages/news/aufarbeitung-documenta-fifteen-gesellschafter-legen-abschlussbericht-der-fachwissenschaftlichen-begleitung-vor/251cd346cd-1751290892/230202_abschlussbericht-fachwissenschaftliche-begleitung.pdf.
6. Madina Tlostanova, “Chilltans the mutable keepers of the world’s equilibrium,” in Chilltan. Shapeshifting eternal spirits from Central Asia. A compilation of images and words responding to syncretic female spirits rooted on shamanic, zoroastrian, buddhist and muslim beliefs, ed. DAVRA research group (Documenta fifteen, 2022), 44.
7. “Chilltan two,” Saodat Ismailova, accessed January 15, 2026, https://saodatismailova.com/chilltan-two/.
8. It is worth noting that each day of the programme the curatorial team presented different happenings in diverse formats. For the specific details of the curation across the forty-one days of documenta fifteen, see the Instagram page of the collective Davra. Davra Collective (@davracollective), Instagram, accessed January 10, 2026, https://www.instagram.com/davracollective/. Artists were free to present their work in any form. While some performances were staged by individual artists and open to all, others were explicitly designed to encourage audience participation.
9. The performers were Aïda Adilbek, Dilda Ramazan, Benazir Ibraimova, Sibel Rokia Ismailova Martínez, Nazira Karimi. The choreography was created together with Jaša Pušnik. From the Instagram account of the collective, Davra Collective (@davracollective), Instagram post, July 7, 2022, https://www.instagram.com/davracollective/.
10. Ibid
11. “Nazira Karimi performanc,” Documenta Fifteen, accessed January 15, 2026, https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/calendar/nazira-karimi-performance/
12. “40 mirrors: Interactive performance,” Documenta Fifteen, accessed January 20, 2026, https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/calendar/forty-mirrors-interactive-performance/.
13. “Jort 2018–2025,” Nazilya Nagimova, accessed January 15, 2026, https://www.nazilya-nagimova.com/artworks/jort.
14. Tlostanova writes that even the name of the artistic group curating the pavilion evokes „in one’s imagination a chain of perfectly rounded communicative models.“ The word „davra“, as I learn it, translated from Persian, means a circle, and as the author notes further, „along with the well-known meanings it also has an important significance of community, a group of like-minded people or those who learn in a circle.“ Madina Tlostanova, “The movement of a hand as a whole. Central Asian “Davra” as a process of communal learning/healing/worlding,” in Chilltan. Shapeshifting eternal spirits from Central Asia. A compilation of images and words responding to syncretic female spirits rooted on shamanic, zoroastrian, buddhist and muslim beliefs, ed. DAVRA research group (Documenta fifteen, 2022), 47.
15. Tlostanova, “The movement of a hand as a whole. Central Asian “Davra” as a process of communal learning/healing/worlding,” 50.
16. Ibid
17. Tlostanova, “The movement of a hand as a whole. Central Asian “Davra” as a process of communal learning/healing/worlding,” 50–51.
18. Tlostanova, “The movement of a hand as a whole. Central Asian “Davra” as a process of communal learning/healing/worlding,” 50.
19. Ibid
20. Tlostanova, “The movement of a hand as a whole. Central Asian “Davra” as a process of communal learning/healing/worlding,” 50.
21. Tlostanova, “The movement of a hand as a whole. Central Asian “Davra” as a process of communal learning/healing/worlding,” 51.
22. Ibid
23. Ibid
24. Tlostanova, “Chilltans the mutable keepers of the world’s equilibrium,” 43.
25. Ibid
26. Tlostanova, “Chilltans the mutable keepers of the world’s equilibrium,” 43. „This structural principle extends beyond temporal organization into the symbolic and narrative dimensions of Central Asian culture, where the number forty populates folklore with a profusion of beings: forty maidens of legendary beauty, forty warriors, forty spirits and djinn and fairies, forty invisible saints, all these wondrous entities inhabiting the permeable border between the material world and its mystical counterparts.“