Astana, Kazakhstan
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kazakhstan emerged as an independent nation. In 1997, President Nursultan Nazarbayev decided to move the capital from Almaty to the remote northern steppe and began constructing a new administrative centre that would become Astana.
Funded largely by revenues from oil and gas, the city grew rapidly into one of the most ambitious urban development projects of recent decades. Designed by an international roster of architects, Astana is a landscape of striking landmarks, monumental government buildings and futuristic forms. Towers, pyramids, vast shopping centres and oversized monuments rise from the flat grasslands, creating an urban environment that often appears closer to a speculative vision of the future than to a conventional city.
Photographed in 2017, this series explores the relationship between architecture, power and national identity. The images focus on the contrast between the city’s grand ambitions and the immense emptiness of the surrounding steppe. While the architecture seeks to project prosperity, progress and permanence, the vast scale of the urban landscape often produces a sense of isolation and unreality.
Astana represents a contemporary version of the planned city: a place conceived not through gradual growth but through political will, economic resources and a desire to create a new image for a nation. The project forms part of an ongoing photographic investigation into cities built from scratch, including Brasília and Chandigarh, and examines how utopian visions are translated into physical space.
