AK JOL - Open Road

Long-term photo-film project examining nomadic values in Kyrgyzstan and their meaning for today’s mobile world. Through collaboration with young female artists it reflects on care, community and the balance of tradition and freedom.

AK JOL – Open Road is a long-term photo-film series that began in September 2024 in Kyrgyzstan. The project explores what contemporary societies can learn from nomadic values such as hospitality, collective responsibility, care for each other and for the land. It reflects on how these values can guide communities in constant movement across human-made borders.

Led by photographer and filmmaker Louise Amelie, the work evolves through close collaboration with young Kyrgyz female artists Ieeza Ospan and Altynai Osmoeva among others. Both embody the tension between inherited traditions and the search for personal freedom. Together they create sets and visual gestures where every object and material carries cultural meaning. Their perspectives reveal layers of memory, identity and aspiration that shape a generation of women in Central Asia.

The project’s artistic language combines slow documentary observation with deliberately staged scenes built from locally available materials. Portraits, landscapes, improvised interiors and ephemeral installations form one narrative that follows routes, waiting points and encounters. By inviting the protagonists to co-create the scenes, the series acknowledges their agency and resists exoticising its subjects.

AK JOL – Open Road benefits from the artist’s sustained engagement in the region since 2021 and from collaboration with cultural researchers, translators and community activists. While all collaborators meet in Kyrgyzstan, the project remains open to follow its protagonists and team members across Central Asia and beyond, reflecting the reality of a mobile generation whose lives transcend national borders.

Public presentations so far include an early short film at the Havana Biennale 2024 and a first public talk with selected images in February 2025. The main production phase will continue through 2026, with the earliest planned release of the full series (including a photobook and a feature-length film) set for 2027. Interim satellite exhibitions will be presented in collaboration with the non-profit Art City.

A core ambition of the work is to provide a platform where migration, intercultural exchange, tradition and cultural heritage can be discussed through the lens of a country rarely present in international political debate. By focusing on Kyrgyz nomadic culture as an entry point, the series opens space for nuanced conversations about why people move, how communities sustain each other in transition and what modern societies might gain by re-learning certain nomadic ethics.

The PhMuseum Women Photographers Grant would support the next research and production phases (funding travel across Central Asia, fees for local collaborators, translation, and post-production).

The project brings a female-led collaborative perspective to a global discourse on mobility, care and belonging, rooted in a region that remains largely unheard on the world photography stage.