In the “Farewell Song” performance, Gulnara Kasmalieva, dressed in a traditional Kyrgyz dressing gown, plays the traditional bowed instrument - kyl-kyyak. A hand-held spinning wheel is placed nearby. Woolen threads extending from the spinning wheel are weaved into Gulnara's braids. During the performance, Gulnara cuts off the braids, breaking her connection with the past. The performance is a reflection on the situation in the Post-Soviet Republics.

Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Dzhumaliev’s film “Sham” is dedicated to the Kochkor Valley - the ancient holy place of Kyrgyzstan, where its spirit Kochkor-Ata lives, an old man in a white robe, hiding his horns under a kalpak. The area itself is surrounded by cliffs. At this natural “wall”, like at the Wailing Wall, people pour out their innermost, find solace and healing. The film is based on documentaries. “Sham” is ritual chants, kindling of ritual fire on the night from Thursday to Friday, which are arranged by shamans, Byubs, bakhshi, emchi demchi. The main pictorial person is a pilgrim woman who came with the hope of healing and a change in her fate.

In 2005 Kasmalieva and Djumaliev documented Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution, which violently ousted the country’s corrupt leaders. Using Edvard Grieg’s well-worn ‘Hall of the Mountain King’ (1876) as a structuring device, the edited action swells and climaxes only within the parameters set by the music. Grieg’s classic (written for Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt) demands the consistent satisfaction of expectations. To borrow this effect for the video is to deny a viewer’s dissent.

In the dual-channel video “Into the Future” (2005) the action takes place on lake Baikal, amid the littered territories, which once were pure nature. Along with the view of the unfinished plant and environmental pollution, we see a group of people waiting for a ferry, into which they all safely load and sail away. They sail away into the unknown. Documentary shooting makes us reflect on the fate of the people in the ferry, who for the artists represent all people living in Central Asia.

“Something about Contemporary Nomadism" is a single-channel video by Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev, shot at the Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow. The authors draw parallels between contemporary travelers now and ancient nomads. We see a process of standard security screening of passengers at the airport, which for artists is a new version of nomadism with its own rituals.

In the five-channel video installation “A New Silk Road: The Algorithm of Survival and Hope” (2006) Kasmalieva andDzhumaliev reflect on the topic of the changes that occurred in Central Asia. This time they are focusing on the historical Silk Road. On the one hand, this is a story about excessive romanticization and mythologization of the historical past of the peoples of this region. On the other, the new realities of trade between Kyrgyzstan and China: porcelain, silk, tea and jewelry transported from China were replaced by tons of small poor-quality consumer goods. In return, trucks from Kyrgyzstan to China transport scrap metal. For artists scrap metal symbolizes a lost utopia: piles of metal used to be Soviet slogans scattered around cities or are disassembled parts of once progressive factories. The work is a reflection of a new reality, a radical breakdown with the past.

In Kasmalieva and Djumaliev’s video “Spring” we can hear Vivaldi’s celebrated eponymous melody, performed by the musicians of the Bishkek Philarmonic orchestra. The action is taking place on the city waste dump in Bishkek outskirts. Since the demise of agriculture after the collapse of the Soviet Union, large part of the rural population moved to cities looking for jobs, but due to the lack of housing they started to inhabit the most improbable places, including in the close proximity to the city dump. In the artists’ video the perception of the mountains of rubbish is changing, becoming a stage for an ‘exceptional’ performance in which Vivaldi’s music resonates simultaneously as a hymn to survival and requiem for the past.

The video was shortlisted for the prestigious Artes Mundi Prize in 2009.