Kurmasheva’s “We Live Here” and the artistic echoes of Kazakhstan’s nuclear age

Zhanana Kurmasheva’s documentary Atameken (We Live Here, 2024) reveals the little-known history and ongoing fallout from nuclear tests at Semipalatinsk. Beyond the film’s focus on personal trauma, Ana Muñoz explores how this legacy is represented in various other artistic forms such as paintings, music, and photography. 

Raw and deeply intimate, Atameken (We Live Here, 2024) by Zhanana Kurmasheva opens a window onto a chapter of history still unfamiliar to many: the nuclear bomb tests carried out at Semipalatinsk between 1949 and 1989 under the Soviet Union. The documentary weaves together three narrative strands. The first follows a family exposed to radiation, focusing on their daughter who, despite never being directly present at the test site, suffers from aplastic anemia, a rare and life-threatening condition in which the bone marrow fails to produce enough blood cells. The illness is often associated with radiation exposure, yet in Kazakhstan it is not officially recognized as a direct consequence of the Semipalatinsk tests. Kurmasheva underscores this bureaucratic refusal and this injustice by following the girl’s father as he petitions the government to acknowledge the link between his daughter’s condition and nuclear testing, a plea that so far has gone unanswered.

The second strand adopts a more scientific approach, following two experts as they survey the 18,000 km² of contaminated steppe — an area that, as Kurmasheva herself points out at the end of the movie, is roughly the size of Slovenia or Israel. This is a striking comparison, though perhaps an unexpectedly daring one in today’s political climate: to invoke Israel as a unit of measurement in a movie about devastation and displacement. Finally, we hear from a man, speaking only in Kazakh, who is writing a book dedicated to those who lived and died under the horrors of radiation. His story is linked to the first family’s, as he is the grandfather of the girl portrayed at the beginning of the movie. This sense of injustice, captured by the characters’ repeated, tearful question, “Pochemu imenno nasha zemlya?” (“Why our land?”), forces the viewer to connect Semipalatinsk’s past trauma with the present-day politics of land, power, and human suffering.

Kurmasheva’s movie is most compelling when it lingers on the barren landscape, juxtaposing the beauty of the Kazakh steppe with the invisible threat buried within. As the movie director admitted during the discussion after the screening, the documentary’s central critique lies in the absence of clear boundaries around the contaminated zone, something that the director herself became aware of when traveling to this area three years ago. This negligence sets off a vicious cycle: cattle graze on poisoned grass, their milk becomes toxic, and this very substance that symbolizes nurture turns into a white poison. Without a doubt, the image of milk seeping into soil stands as the movie’s most powerful sequence and reminds the viewer of Sergei Eisenstein’s montage technique. At the same time, this shot in particular also resonates with the Kuleshov effect, demonstrating how meaning emerges not from individual frames but from the interplay and juxtaposition between them. In this sense, Kurmasheva engages — perhaps unconsciously — with the legacy of Soviet montage, reappropriating it for a modern act of political and artistic protest.

The nuclear legacy in art

The focus on ecological disasters and personal trauma places Kurmasheva’s work in dialogue with other artistic responses to Semipalatinsk. For example, the suffering of the girl and her family depicted in Kurmasheva’s documentary echoes the testimony embedded in the paintings of Karipbek Kuyukov, the Kazakh artist born without arms due to his parents’ exposure to radiation. Beyond his art, Kuyukov has dedicated his life to nuclear disarmament. As an honorary ambassador for the ATOM Project (Abolishing Testing our Mission) — an international campaign launched by the Nazarbayev Centre of Kazakhstan — to abolish nuclear testing, he has addressed international forums, including the United Nations, advocating for a world free of nuclear weapons. All of Kuyukov’s paintings reveal his deeply personal and traumatic connection to the Polygon. Like Kurmasheva’s cinematic representation of the steppe, they convey a sense of majesty and vitality, yet this beauty is inseparable from the pain and suffering they depict. His works bear witness to the trauma endured by those living in the shadow of nuclear testing, echoing the experiences of an entire generation of Kazakhs who were silenced, marginalized, and subjected to both state oppression and the invisible violence of radiation.

Echoes of the nuclear age in music

On the other hand, music has offered a different path into this trauma. The Kazakh violinist Galya Bisengalieva released Polygon on 20 October 2023, an album of music that translates devastation into sound by mixing the torn bow strokes of her violin with electronic distortion, sudden silences, and traditional Kazakh instruments which evoke both the thunder of detonations, the haunting quiet that follows, and the beauty of the Kazakh countryside. Its follow-up, Polygon Reflections, released on 29 August 2025, features reimagined versions of the original tracks with the participation of international artists such as The Bug, Hatis Noit, and KMRU. The release of these two albums also coincides with the emergence of a revitalized electronic music scene in Kazakhstan, slowly gaining international recognition. This cultural renaissance can be felt even while walking through the streets of Almaty, where posters for upcoming events hint at a growing energy and global engagement with the country’s vibrant electronic music culture.

Nuclear remnants in photography

Beyond Kazakhstan, the Semipalatinsk Polygon’s tragic legacy and its artistic representations have captured significant international attention. Julian Charrière’s photographic series Polygon (2014) also documents the desolate landscapes and remnants of the site, capturing both its stark beauty and its silent menace. In a striking conceptual gesture, he exposed the undeveloped negatives to radiation from the site, allowing the contamination itself to leave traces on the photographic material. This process transforms the images into a literal record of nuclear history, where the medium bears the scars of the very force it depicts. Julian Charrière, born in 1987 in Morges, Switzerland, is a French-Swiss conceptual artist based in Berlin whose work explores the intersections of environmental science, cultural history, and the Anthropocene. Polygon was part of Charrière’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Bugada & Cargnel in Paris, where he presented works exploring a geo-archaeology of the future.

In a discussion following the August screening of Atameken at a film festival in Almaty, three men from Semipalatinsk approached the director to thank her for her work and reflected, with tears in their eyes, on what it meant to belong to what they called a “poteryannoe pokolenie” (“lost generation”). At the same time, they made an urgent call for solidarity. Their testimony encapsulates not only personal grief but also collective memory, emphasizing the ongoing consequences of nuclear testing on individuals and communities. This appeal for recognition and justice is echoed in the broader historical context as Kazakhstan became the first country in the world to voluntarily renounce nuclear weapons, transforming the legacy of trauma into an act of ethical resistance. Yet, how can a nation truly be called ethical if the thousands who suffered from radiation exposure were, and in many ways still are, left in silence and neglect?

We Live Here (2024) was screened on 30 August as part of the 2025 Qyzqaras Film Festival.

Featured image: Canva