Like dervishes, dancers turned in circles in their white and rainbow kimonos in the hall of the Almaty Museum of Arts during a performance by Greek artist Nefeli Papadimouli. They were creating space amongst the crowd that receded more and more towards the walls of the building. Two British businesspeople behind me continued to network while the sleeves of the dervishes missed them by just a few centimeters. It was the night of the museum’s opening, and, as surreal as it was, these two people’s intense chatting about investments and deals, as if nothing was happening around them, is not surprising for Kazakhstan. We are in a country known for cars, natural resources and wealth generated through oil exports, and many people here—expats and locals alike—have habits that are hard to break.
Asking someone to put aside industry to appreciate art is a tough sell, though that’s likely to change with the recent openings, just a few days apart, of the Almaty Museum and the Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture. Together they mark the beginning of a new phase for Kazakhstan, and its epicenter is the country’s historical cultural capital versus the more business-oriented Astana.
A city of contradictions, Almaty is very green and has many parks but is also plagued by traffic, resulting in it being one of the 25 most polluted cities in the world. The city center has a number of Soviet buildings and decorations that speak to its past—especially to space exploration—but those have been carelessly swallowed by KFC, Starbucks and Burger King. Here, the communist past and consumerist present conflate, and these juxtapositions are reminders that the recent history of Kazakhstan is anything but easy. The large former USSR state was originally composed of nomadic populations coming from Central Asia, and today there is a Muslim-majority population that speaks both Russian and Kazakh, a language once seen as inferior by the Russians, who tried for years to suppress it.
Many of its contemporary artists explore what it means to decolonize from Russia, rebelling against a form of orientalism that differs from that practiced by Western colonial powers. Among them is Almagul Menlibayeva, one of the most widely known contemporary Kazakh artists, whose work reconfigures nomadic narratives, remixing symbols and centering women. She was chosen as the subject of the first solo exhibition at the Almaty Museum of Arts—a comprehensive and stunning show curated by Gridthiya Gaweewong.
Women are at the center of the Kazakh art scene. “The presence of women artists is not by design; it is simply the reality of our scene,” Almaty Museum director Meruyert Kalieva told Observer. On the day of the opening, she was pregnant and radiant in a white dress, representing not only an authoritative voice for contemporary art in Kazakhstan, but also cutting a goddess-like figure. “Women are the leading voices in Kazakhstan, and it naturally reflects in the museum.”
The evolving Central Asian art scene
It has been a few years since Central Asia began quietly making a place for itself on the international art scene. A significant moment in recent years was the Central Asian focus at the Parisian art fair Asia Now, where a European public could encounter the presentations of Aspan Gallery, founded by Kalieva, and Pygmalion Gallery, founded by Danagul Tolepbay, who was behind the Kazakh Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Central Asian and Caucasus contemporary art was highlighted last year at Abu Dhabi Art, in a special section curated by Elvira Eevr Djaltchinova-Malec, director and founder of the WIMCAA Foundation.
Both from a market standpoint and a critical standpoint, there is a tendency to consider the region too broadly. Curator Sara Raza, director of the soon-to-open Centre for Contemporary Art in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, developed with her curatorial studio, Punk Orientalism, a number of shows focusing on the region, including projects in Doha. In this context, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan—the two most prominent “stans” in terms of emerging art scenes—have shown a degree of rivalry. Both have hosted major events in the past few weeks, but there has been little collaboration between them. While Kazakhstan received in Almaty many art professionals coming from the Bukhara Biennale and the Tashkent Art Centre preview, Uzbekistan did little to facilitate wider engagement, with only a few Uzbek representatives present at the Almaty Museum of Arts opening.
The comparison between the two countries is inevitable, although not entirely fair: Uzbekistan’s government has heavily invested in cultural infrastructure in recent years, using art as part of a broader tourism and heritage strategy, while Kazakhstan continues to rely largely on private initiatives to grow its art scene.
Kazakhstan’s rising art system
In this nascent contemporary art ecosystem, it’s only natural for pivotal art figures like Kalieva to wear many different hats and contribute to the art scene in different ways. At the moment, there seem not to be enough curators in the country, though at the same time, Kazakhstan is less heavy-handed in sourcing art expertise from the West, compared to many other Middle Eastern or Asian countries.
Consider the Almaty Museum’s inaugural curators: Latvian Inga Lace—C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow at MoMA in New York, curator at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art and an otherwise eminent figure in the Eastern European art scene—and Gridthiya Gaweewong, arguably a household name in Southeast Asian contemporary art, having directed the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok and the Thailand Biennale 2023 in Chiang Rai.
“When putting together the first presentation for the Almaty Museum of Arts, I trusted our specialists, like Gridthiya and Inga, in order to bring new visions and new feelings to contemporary art,” Kalieva said. “My role is to balance these different mentalities and find compromises, while giving artists complete freedom in temporary exhibitions.”
Seventy percent of the works in the museum come from the personal collection of the Almaty Museum of Arts founder Nurlan Smagulov. For him, the museum is both a personal and a national endeavor. “During the Soviet Union, everything was prohibited,” he told Observer. “Going abroad was impossible. Nobody collected art, and artists could only work in socialist realism. Today we have freedom, and I still cannot get enough of it. Building this museum is my way of making sure this freedom translates into art.”
Smagulov’s passion for art emerged long before the museum was conceived: “When I was 17, studying in Moscow, I used to go to the Pushkin Museum during lunch breaks. Seeing the Impressionists was like a bombshell to me,” he recalled. “At that time, I never thought I would leave the country, let alone collect art. Today I have some of these works in my collection, and it still feels unreal that I could bring them back to Kazakhstan.”
The Almaty Museum’s building was designed to convey this idea of openness, with spacious and squared-off architecture featuring pale limestone and rust-colored window frames reminiscent of Richard Serra sculptures. The result is a warm, expansive, luminous and orderly space that feels open but also structured.
It’s a shame that during the week of the opening, international audiences coming to Almaty didn’t have any points of comparison or historical progression, as the main public art museum in Almaty, Kasteyev State Museum of Arts, was closed for renovation. Taken pessimistically, this shows how little vested interest the government has in the organic development of its art scene. We are left to wonder just how much private taste shapes a country’s art history. “Choosing works is a lot of responsibility. We visited many museums, studied carefully, and selected works with a strong connection to our region,” Smagulov asserted. “This is not about ticking boxes with blue-chip names. Every work here is chosen for its relation to Kazakhstan.”
Regional shifts in politics and culture
The Almaty Museum of Arts opens at a very particular time for the region. With the war in Ukraine and the decline of the art scene in Russia, it’s worth considering whether Kazakhstan, and the other Central Asian “stans,” might become a new center for contemporary art from the entire region, something that is no longer possible in Moscow or Saint Petersburg.
The permanent collection of the Almaty Museum doesn’t veer much towards Russia; it is, as Smagulov said, very much focused on Kazakh and Central Asian art. “Kazakhstan has always been more Eurasian than Russia. Around 30 percent of our territory is in Europe, and with our large Russian population, our country is often seen as more Westernized than Uzbekistan. But at the same time, our nomadic roots and openness set us apart. We don’t close ourselves behind fences; we live in the open steppe.” Smagulov emphasized that the museum sees itself as part of a decolonial process. “This is about a longer search for Kazakh identity apart from Soviet ideology. You can already see it in the art of the 1960s. Now it has become even more urgent.”
He added that he conceived the museum as part of a larger ecosystem: “We hope the Almaty Museum will have a Bilbao effect for the city, attracting both international guests and visitors from across Kazakhstan. But more than that, we want to create ambitious projects and make sure Kazakh artists are represented abroad, so people know how rich our country is in poetry and art.”
