Karaganda, Karaganda is a site-based research project, anchored in the slow dissolution of Karlag, a massive former Soviet gulag in Karaganda, Kazakhstan. Constructed in 1931, it was quietly closed in 1959 and subsumed into daily life, its structures remaining in partial but practical ruins. Approaching the site as an expansive structure of memory, this research is primarily realized through extensive visiting and listening, focused on the ways in which architecture, land, and sound hold and transmit historical memory. While an official museum now exists, most of the gulag remains unmarked, its histories circulating through unofficial means: oral histories, song, self-organized micromuseums, architectural reuse, and over a dozen unmarked mass graves, preserved only through word-of-mouth. The project takes form as an expanded video essay, building montaged frameworks of monumental memory, grafted onto these existing structures. Its text is shaped by exilic grammars—of dispersal, dislocation, and disrepair—producing a poetic and spatial narrative composed somewhere between the solidity of official memory and the dispersal of intimate, unofficial forms.

Kandis Friesen is a conceptual artist living in Berlin. Her practice is anchored in constructions of monumental memory, working between the solidity of official narratives and the dispersal of intimate, unofficial forms. Her work has been exhibited and screened at the Odesa National Fine Arts Museum, Odesa; Kunst im Stadtraum, Berlin; Galerie im Turm, Berlin; CAFKA Biennial of Art in Public Space, Kitchener-Waterloo; Roman Susan Art Foundation, as part of the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial, Chicago; Festival international du film sur l’art, Montréal; Images Festival, Toronto; and Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, Jihlava, among others. Friesen has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and in 2021 she held the CALQ Québec Studio fellowship at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. She holds a master’s degree from the Art Theory and Practice program from Northwestern University, and a bachelor’s degree in Intermedia Arts program at Concordia University.