The (Post)Colonial Alphabet

The (Post)Colonial Alphabet

Anna Kin’s «ღ» and the Semiotics of Imperial Continuity

In January 2025, Kazakhstan planned to implement a transition to the Latin alphabet—the fourth alphabet change in a hundred years. The Arabic script was first introduced to the territory of Kazakhstan in the eleventh century following the spread of Islam and was traditionally used to write Kazakh until the introduction of a Latin alphabet in 1929. It’s crucial to note that this adoption of Arabic script did not mark the beginning of writing among Turkic peoples—the Old Turkic script (also known as Orkhon-Yenisei script) was already in use by the 8th century, with inscriptions discovered in Mongolia’s Orkhon Valley. This ancient runic script predates many writing systems of sedentary peoples, directly challenging colonial narratives about nomadic illiteracy.

The Arabic script that came to dominate the region for nearly a thousand years thus represented not an introduction of writing to «preliterate» nomads, but rather one layer in a complex palimpsest of scripts—from ancient Turkic runes to Sogdian-derived systems to Arabic, and later to Latin (1929) and Cyrillic (1940). Since 2017, the country has once again been moving toward Latin, though deadlines are constantly postponed, and society remains divided between those who see this as a path to modernization and those who fear losing connection with their written heritage.

Each alphabet reform erases not only the recent past but also deeper historical layers—a pattern that reveals how these transitions function as tools of colonial control. The Soviet myth that nomadic peoples lacked sophisticated literary traditions before «modernization» obscures the rich textual heritage of the Turkic world, from the Orkhon inscriptions to the complex manuscript traditions that flourished across the steppes.

With the transition to a new alphabet, the process of knowledge transmission and creation of new knowledge risks becoming more complicated. On the other hand, depending on language, authors, time period, and governing regime, history can sound different. This raises questions: How often has history been reinterpreted before the arrival of «New Kazakhstan»? Does this mean that information in Latin script, written by new academics, will approach truth? And, more importantly, will this transition help in better understanding oneself and others on a humanitarian level?

It is precisely at this moment of historical rupture that the project “ღ” by young Kazakhstani artist Anna Kin emerges. The title is a letter from the Kartvelian alphabet, the only symbol that has remained unchanged through all alphabet reforms of the Georgian language. A metaphor for stability amid transformations. A constant whose immutability makes visible the radical change of the entire semiotic landscape around it.

The project constitutes a total installation—a space filled with the sounds of thirteen alphabets. Macedonian, Lak, Azerbaijani, Georgian, Nogai, Serbian, Albanian, Berber, Ukrainian, Farsi, Lezgin, Mari, Balkar. All languages sound simultaneously, creating a polyphony of voices. The viewer can listen to the general facade of sounds or choose individual stories through headphones: interviews with descendants of the deported, stories about lost languages, memories of forced relocations of the 1930s-40s. Letters suspended in space tremble from air movement created by visitors: language exists only in the circulation of breath between speech apparatuses.

But why these specific languages? And why now, at the moment of new Latinization? The answer lies in the very nature of alphabet reforms, which are never merely technical modernization. The Soviet project of the 1920s-30s for Latinization of Turkic languages was presented as liberation from “Arab feudalism” and a path to international proletarian unity. The real goal was different—to sever ties with the Islamic world, Ottoman heritage, to create “new people” without memory of the pre-Soviet past.

The Cyrillization of the 1940s followed the same logic but with the opposite sign. Latin suddenly became “bourgeois, ” Cyrillic—a sign of joining “great Russian culture.” Within a decade, the possibility of reading the recent past was crossed out twice. This is not a side effect but the central goal: to create a generation without roots, completely dependent on the state for interpretation of history.

Contemporary Latinization in Kazakhstan speaks of decolonization, distancing from Soviet heritage, integration into the global world, but simultaneously severs the connection between generations. Once linguistic continuity is broken, the process of knowledge transmission becomes complicated, reading original texts becomes difficult.

But alphabet reforms are only part of the story. Parallel to them came mass deportations of “unreliable” peoples to Kazakhstan and Central Asia. 1937—172 thousand Koreans from the Far East. 1941—444 thousand Volga Germans. 1943-44—Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Balkars, Crimean Tatars, Meskhetian Turks, Greeks, Bulgarians. By 1945, more than 1.2 million deported people found themselves in Kazakhstan—a quarter of the republic’s population.

Each deportation was not only physical displacement but also linguistic catastrophe. Torn from their native places, scattered across the steppes, deprived of schools in their native language, the deported lost their languages within two to three generations. In the Kazakhstani steppes, their languages became sounds without referent, signs without signified. Koreans who arrived in 1937 today mostly do not speak Korean. Volga Germans, who had an autonomous republic with German schools and universities, transformed into a Russian-speaking diaspora.

Here it is important to note the complexity of the Kazakhs’ own position. They received the deported while being themselves victims of genocide. In 1930-33, 1.5-2 million Kazakhs died from hunger, 38-42% of the population. This creates a unique constellation: a people who survived their own catastrophe become involuntary witnesses and participants in the catastrophes of other peoples. Not by their own will, not as aggressors, but as fellow victims of empire, forced to share scarce resources with new exiles.

Anna Kin, an artist who grew up in Almaty, works precisely with this complex position. She creates a space where different voices sound simultaneously. The thirteen languages in the installation are a polyphony of equal voices, a model of solidarity based not on ethnic proximity but on shared experience of imperial violence.

Initially, Kin approached the project as an archivist. In an interview with Ani Menua, she admits: “I had quite a fatalistic attitude—some of these languages are disappearing, losing popularity, their sound needs to be preserved.” The artist set out to create an audio archive, to fix pronunciation so descendants could use it for knowledge transmission. But during fieldwork, an important shift occurred. Meeting with descendants of the deported in Kazakhstan and representatives of diasporas in Europe, Anna discovered that simple fixation was insufficient. People told stories not simply about languages but about destroyed families, lost homes, the impossibility of return. Language turned out to be a metonymy for a deeper loss—entire worlds, ways of life, connections to land and history. A more important discovery was finding new initiatives for preserving languages and cultures.

Here the project transformed from documentary to affective. Instead of creating an “objective” archive, Kin began working with emotional resonance. The simultaneous sounding of all alphabets creates not an informational but a sensory space in which individual voices are lost and found, just as the deported were lost and found each other in the Kazakhstani steppes.

Particularly interesting is the choice of languages extending beyond Soviet deportations. Serbian, Albanian, Berber—these are references to other imperial contexts. The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, French colonization of North Africa, contemporary conflicts around language rights. Many of the chosen languages continue to be under pressure: Lezgin and Lak are marginalized in contemporary Russia, Berber fights for recognition in North Africa, Nogai is under threat of extinction, activists of Mari language revival face repression. The project does not archive dead languages—it witnesses ongoing violence.

Kin creates a transnational framework, showing that linguistic violence is not a unique Soviet practice but a universal pattern of imperial control. This is an important move against narrow nationalism. All empires use similar technologies of control.

The project’s trajectory from Almaty to Berlin is also significant for understanding its semantic layers. The first showing took place within ARTBAT FEST 11, realized as a result of the educational program Egin by curators: Vladislav Sludsky, journalist and researcher Dmitry Mazorenko, history master Zhanar Bekmurzina, and researcher and curator Artem Sleta. Seminars reading Spivak and Chakrabarty, attempting to create critical discourse under conditions of strengthening control, took place under the umbrella of Eurasian Cultural Alliance. The initiative’s creators understand it as part of grassroots intellectual infrastructure—an attempt to preserve space for critical thought.

The Berlin presentation in September 2025 took place at Hotel Continental, which positions itself as an “Art Space in Exile.” Under the curatorship of Zuleykha Ibad, an Azerbaijani curator working with themes of transnational exchanges and postcolonial critique, and Kazakhstani producer Lev Tarikov, the project acquired a new dimension. Here it reads not as a local statement about the Kazakhstani situation but as part of a global conversation about linguistic violence—from Soviet deportations to contemporary migration crises.

In the Berlin version, a new element appeared—a microphone inviting visitors to pronounce their own alphabet. This gesture radically changes the project’s dynamic: from a space of listening, it becomes a space of utterance. If in Almaty the installation documented lost voices, in Berlin—a city of diasporas and exiles—it becomes a platform for new ones.

This participatory element can also be read as democratization of the archive—the right to voice is granted not only to “historical victims” but to anyone who feels the necessity to declare their language. In the context of European debates about integration, assimilation, and multiculturalism, this is a political gesture: an assertion of the right to linguistic diversity in opposition to demands for linguistic unification.

The very concept of exile becomes key here. What does it mean to be in exile in an era when the very idea of home becomes problematic? For post-Soviet artists, departure often exists in a gray zone between political pressure and economic necessity, being neither fully forced nor fully voluntary.

Kin remains in Almaty, speaking at the opening via video link. This gesture can be read as a refusal of center-periphery logic, according to which real art is produced in metropolises. Remaining in Kazakhstan, under conditions of “political winter, ” Kin asserts the possibility of critical utterance from the very point of trauma, without the need to distance oneself from it geographically.

The context of the project’s creation is critically important for its understanding. 2023-25 in Kazakhstan is a paradoxical moment of cultural boom amid strengthening control. A private museum and contemporary art center open, international exhibitions take place, the art scene develops. Simultaneously, the list of political prisoners grows, journalists receive sentences for “spreading false information.” Arman Nurmakov in the essay “The Myth of Transit” describes this as a characteristic feature of Central Asian regimes—“an amazing ability to maintain the status quo for a very long time.” A “gray zone” where critical art is possible, but within certain frameworks.

Project “ღ” navigates these limitations with particular precision. It is historical enough not to be perceived as direct political critique. Artistic enough not to read as activist statement. But also resonant enough with the present that an attentive viewer will see parallels between past and present.

A comparison with the collective Slavs and Tatars, also working with post-Soviet and Islamic space, is appropriate here. But where Slavs and Tatars use irony and pop aesthetics from the safe diaspora of Berlin and New York, Kin chooses seriousness and immersion, working with her own context from within. This position endows her with moral authority: she is not a tourist in someone else’s trauma, but also takes risks, requiring more subtle navigation of local political limitations.

The project’s strength lies in its refusal of “black-and-white” positions. Kin does not romanticize the past or demonize the present. Deported peoples suffered under the Soviet regime, but some of them participated in colonization of Kazakh lands in the 19th century. Russian language was an instrument of imperial domination, but for many became native and the only means of interethnic communication. The project reflects all these contradictions simultaneously, without attempting to resolve them.

Ultimately, project “ღ” is a practice against erasure. In a country where each change of power promises a new beginning from a clean slate, where inconvenient history is silenced or rewritten, where collective amnesia becomes a condition of survival, Kin insists on the necessity of remembering. But this is not nostalgic memory calling for return to an idealized past. Nor victimized memory frozen in victim position. This is critical memory, the ability to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously, to recognize history’s complexity, to learn from mistakes without repeating them.

Frantz Fanon wrote: “To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.” Kin’s project cannot change political reality directly, but it can preserve and transmit what power tries to erase: memory of violence, experience of loss, hope for justice. In the installation space, thirteen languages continue to sound simultaneously, reminding that polyphony is possible, that the future need not repeat the past.

The Georgian letter ღ, which gave the project its name, survived all reforms of the Georgian alphabet—a small symbol of resilience amid transformations. Perhaps this detail contains the project’s main message: not in loud manifestos of resistance but in quiet persistence of preservation. In remembering names, sounds, stories. In creating spaces where different voices can sound simultaneously without drowning each other out. Kin’s project is an act of faith that memory is stronger than forgetting, that somewhere between lost alphabets and new reforms exists a space for genuine dialogue. A space where history does not begin with the latest decree but continues through all ruptures and transformations, preserving the connection of times.

Liza Kin
Berlin, November 7, 2025

Anna Kin’s Project «ღ» at Art Space in Exile
Elsenstraße 87
12435 Berlin, Kreuzberg
September 9–16, 2025

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This article was originally written for vlast.kz