Almagul Menlibayeva

Almagul Menlibayeva works across video, photography, performance, and installation, weaving the experimental charge of the Soviet avant-garde with a distinctly nomadic imaginary of the Central Asian steppe. Her practice returns to recurring questions - myth and modernity, gender and ritual, ecology and neo-colonial extractivism- treating the image as a mediator between ancestral cosmologies and contemporary life. Menlibayeva often articulates this as activating a collective “archaic atavism” or egregor: not an inward essence, but an external force awakened by post-Soviet histories and set into dialogue with transnational circuits of ideas. Documentary and staged scenes interleave in her films and photo-tableaux, not as opposites but as complementary methods for inquiry, asking in different registers the same fundamental questions: Who am I? Where am I going?

Her work has been presented widely, including solo exhibitions at Museum Arnhem (2019) and the Grand Palais, Paris (2016), and group exhibitions such as As Though We Hid the Sun in a Sea of Stories at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2023), the Thailand Biennale, Chiang Rai (2023), the 15th Sharjah Biennial (2023), the Guangzhou Triennial (2023), the 2nd Lahore Biennale (2020), Elective Affinities at NCCA, Moscow (2015), The Union of Fire and Water at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), the 8th Sydney Biennale (2012), and the 1st Kyiv Biennial (2012).

In 2025, the Almaty Museum of Arts opens with Menlibayeva’s landmark solo, I Understand Everything (curated by Gridthiya Gaweewong). The exhibition foregrounds her pivotal role in contemporary art while unveiling, for the first time, a corpus of early works—never before shown publicly—that differs strikingly from her current practice yet lays the foundation of her visual language. These formative pieces mark the first contours of the myths, gendered rituals, and steppe cosmologies that would later crystallize in her films and photo-tableaux.

Saule Suleimenova

Working across painting, drawing, photography and public art, Saule Suleimenova examines how collective memory is built from everyday images—family albums, municipal archives, the semiotics of streets and courtyards—and how those images shape identity in contemporary Kazakhstan. Trained as an architectural designer, she composes scenes with a planner’s sense of structure and flow, often staging urban vignettes that feel both observational and emblematic. Since 2014 she has developed her signature “cellophane paintings,” collages made entirely from recycled plastic bags and films—no paint—cut and layered into luminous, pictorial fields. The medium is not a novelty but an ethic: plastic becomes both palette and critique, a material index of consumer culture repurposed to speak about history, care and civic truth. Earlier cycles, from the graphic Kazakh Chronicle works to paintings-on-photographs, trace the same impulse to read the present through images of the past, and to anchor social commentary in the textures of Almaty’s daily life.

Suleimenova’s work has been shown internationally, including the parallel program of the inaugural Bukhara Biennial (2025), the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), the 5th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2013), solo exhibitions with Andakulova Gallery (Dubai), and projects such as Steppe Pastoral at the American University of Central Asia (Bishkek). She is a laureate of the Zhiger, Shabyt, and Tengri Umai prizes. Recent coverage has highlighted her sustained engagement with post-/decolonial discourse and her environmental methodology—recycling plastic into images that restore nuance to public narratives.

Said Atabekov

Said Atabekov’s practice spans photography, video, performance, and installation, carrying forward the experimental ethos he helped shape in the early 1990s with the Shymkent collective Kyzyl Traktor. His work probes the fault lines where steppe ritual meets global spectacle, where Soviet afterlives collide with market-era imagery. Atabekov often turns to ethnographic motifs—horsemen, textiles, tools, heraldic emblems—not as tokens of identity but as charged signs that reveal how stereotypes operate and how power re-styles the past. Irony is his instrument of measure: with a light, exact touch he stages scenes in which the local and the transnational, the sacred and the staged, expose one another, and the viewer is asked to read the image as evidence as much as icon.

Atabekov’s work has been widely exhibited, including Memory. Space. Progress at the A. Kasteev State Museum of Arts, Almaty (2025); PLAY, FITE Textile Biennial, Bargoin Museum, Clermont-Ferrand (2024); Parcours, Asia Now, Paris (2023); Totems of Central Asia, Andakulova Gallery, Dubai (2022); The Missing Planet, Centro Pecci, Prato (2019); Thinking Collections, Telling Tales, Mana Contemporary, New Jersey (2018); Eurasian Utopia: Postscriptum, Suwon I’Park Museum of Art (2018); Starting from the Desert. Ecologies on the Edge, Yinchuan Biennale (2018); Post-Nomadic Mind, Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, London (2018); Suns and Neons above Kazakhstan, YARAT, Baku (2017); The Other & Me, Sharjah Art Museum (2014); the 5th Moscow Biennale (2013); the Central Asia Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2005, 2007, 2011); Ostalgia, New Museum, New York (2011); Time of the Storytellers, Kiasma, Helsinki (2007); and the 9th Istanbul Biennial (2005).

Alexander Ugay

Alexander Ugay works across photography, moving image, and installation to examine how memory is constructed, stored, and replayed across personal and collective histories. His practice circles recurrent themes—diaspora and displacement, the friction between archival time and lived time, the slippage between private interiors and public space, and the mutable status of the photographic image as both document and fiction. Oscillating between Soviet-era 8–16mm film and contemporary digital recording, he treats technology not as style but as argument: different apparatuses yield different kinds of remembering. Motifs of return, repetition, and quiet ritual run through the work, as do the landscapes of Central Asia that anchor his inquiry in place while opening it to transnational narratives. Rather than illustrating history, Ugay stages conditions in which it can surface—slowly, materially—so that the image becomes a site where forgetting and recall are negotiated in real time.

Ugay’s work has been presented widely, from the New Museum’s generational triennial Younger Than Jesus (New York, 2009) and Promises of the Past at the Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2010) to the 9th Istanbul Biennial (2005), Busan Biennale (2014), the 6th Moscow Biennale (2015), and the Kyiv Biennial (2017), as well as institutional exhibitions at Lunds konsthall and the Suwon I’Park Museum of Art (both 2018). This sustained institutional attention—together with collection and triennial inclusions—speaks to his ongoing inquiry into image phenomenology, the politics of remembrance, and the shifting status of the photographic object within post-Soviet and transnational contexts.

Elena and Viktor Vorobyev

Working in collaboration since the early 1990s, Elena and Viktor Vorobyev develop a precise, concept-driven practice across photography, video, installation, drawing, and text. Their method is observational and taxonomic: series and typologies that catalogue the overlooked—colours, objects, minor rituals—through which post-Soviet life reveals its structures of habit, authority, and desire. With light irony and disarming clarity, they reframe the mundane as a field of signs, showing how small, often accidental details generate meaning and how a landscape of constant change breeds both disorientation and invention. The result is a multi-layered portrait of everyday reality in which the ephemeral becomes evidence and the banal becomes a sharp social metaphor.

Their work has been presented widely, including the retrospective The Artist Is Asleep at the A. Kasteev State Museum of Arts, Almaty (2015, curated by Viktor Misiano), and group exhibitions such as Viva Arte Viva, 57th Venice Biennale (2017); the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane (2015); BALAGAN!!! (Berlin, 2015); The Beast and the Sovereign (MACBA, Barcelona, and Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, 2015); the 1st Kyiv Biennial (2012); the 14th Carrara Sculpture Biennale (2010); and the Central Asia Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2005, 2007, 2009). More recently, their work featured in The Human Condition sessions at MMOMA, Moscow (2018–19), Phantom Stories: Leitmotifs of Post-Soviet Asia at Lunds konsthall (2018), Eurasian Utopia: Postscriptum at Suwon I’Park Museum of Art (2018), and The Missing Planet at Centro Pecci, Prato (2019). Their works are held in public collections including the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Sharjah Art Foundation, MuHKA (Antwerp), Centro Pecci (Prato), the A. Kasteev State Museum of Arts (Almaty), and other regional museums.

Gulnur Mukazhanova

Gulnur Mukazhanova works with felt, silk fibre, and brocade to test what textile can do when it moves from the domestic sphere into the space of contemporary art. Felting, in her hands, is a slow performance—laying and binding fibres into dense, chromatic fields that register as horizons, weather, and wounds. The material carries memory: of hands, of steppe, of social codes that both shelter and constrain. Mukazhanova’s abstractions often read as quiet topographies, yet they are keyed to the contradictions of the post-Soviet present—how hopes of freedom hardened into new traps, how identity and belonging are negotiated between tradition and global circulation. She treats textile not as ornament but as thought: a medium for repair and critique, for holding tenderness and pressure in the same surface.

Her work has been shown internationally, including the Venice Biennale project The Wind Makes the Sky at Ca’ Giustinian with her solo presentation Memory of Hope (2024–25); Eluding Capture: Three Artists from Central Asia at MASS MoCA (2024); transfeminisms: Chapter IV – Care and Kinship at Mimosa House, London (2024); Bread & Roses at MOMENTUM, Berlin (2018); Post-Nomadic Mind at the Wapping Project, London (2018); the 4th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2014); and the Central Asia Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007). Recent exhibitions and critical writing have described her evolving language as a form of “new abstract expressionism,” where textile’s tactility and silence become instruments for thinking through gender, ecology, and cultural memory.

Askhat Akhmedyarov

Askhat Akhmedyarov moves fluidly between painting, drawing, photography, video, installation, and performance, treating the artwork as a site where everyday gestures collide with the politics of visibility. His practice is anchored in the Shymkent school—he studied at the Shymkent art college and worked closely with Vitaly Simakov and Moldakul Narymbetov of Kyzyl Traktor—yet it unfolds in a distinctly personal register: wry, direct, and attuned to the frictions of post-Soviet life. Ambiguity and irony are central tools; he stages actions that produce a critical distance between artist and viewer, revealing the dissonance of cultural ritual, social habit, and state rhetoric in an ever-shifting public sphere. Early on he looked to Surrealism (Dalí, Ernst, Magritte) for strategies of estrangement; today that impulse is re-channeled into performances and image-objects that make contradiction legible—how globalization and local codes interpenetrate, how identities are unmade and remade in the open air of the street.

Akhmedyarov emerged with the Shymkent “Trans-Avant-Garde” exhibitions before turning to an independent practice in Astana and, later, Almaty. Since then he has presented works and public actions across Kazakhstan and abroad, often in dialogue with urban space and its unofficial audiences. His projects—sometimes provocative enough to draw official admonitions—affirm an artist’s responsibility to “resonate with his time”: to test the limits of speech, to register ethical pressure without didacticism, and to keep open a space where looking can become a civic act.

Bakhyt Bubikanova

Bakhyt Bubikanova worked across painting, collage, installation, performance, photography, and video, developing a concise, concept-driven language anchored by a sculptor’s sense of structure. Educated at the Zhurgenov Kazakh National Academy of Arts and later mentored by Moldakul Narymbetov of Kyzyl Traktor, she brought formal clarity to projects that examined how symbols circulate through everyday life in Kazakhstan—how ornament can function as syntax, how humor and play reveal contradictions in social rituals, and how local visual codes converse with global image culture. Often staging modest materials and deliberate gestures, she built tableaux that moved fluently between intimacy and public address, turning pattern, repetition, and wit into instruments of critique.

Her work was shown widely, including the 14th Gwangju Biennale (2023); Clouds, Power and Ornament – Roving Central Asia at CHAT, Hong Kong (2023); ORNAMENTUM at Aspan Gallery, Almaty (2020); Eurasian Utopias: Post Scriptum at Suwon I’Park Museum of Art (2018); Suns and Neons above Kazakhstan at Yarat, Baku (2017); La vie est une légende. e.cité – Almaty/Kazakhstan at MAMCS, Strasbourg (2014); the 4th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2014); and The Face of the Bride at PERMM Museum of Contemporary Art (2012). Together these contexts map a practice that used media hybridity and precise formal decisions to think through ornament, power, and cultural translation.

Sayan Baigaliyev

Sayan Baigaliyev’s practice sits between observational painting and constructed image, using thick facture, collage elements, and occasional relief to test where a painting ends and the world begins. Everyday scenes—friends, streets, courtyards, interiors, small gestures—become stages for looking at class, intimacy, and the choreography of public life. Trained in easel painting yet alert to contemporary image culture, he often pushes figuration toward the tactile: scraped grounds, built-up skins of paint, and inserted materials that make the surface read as both picture and object. The result is an elastic realism—neither academic nor purely documentary—in which the familiar is sharpened, sometimes made unruly, and the boundary between representation and presence is deliberately thin.

He attended boarding school and college, specializing in easel painting, at the T. Zhurgenov Kazakh National Academy of Arts in Almaty. He also studied at the V. I. Surikov Moscow State Academic Art Institute, where he attended a contemporary art workshop led by Aidan Salakhova. He studied museum practice in Paris and was a resident of the 9th season of the Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art's Open Studios. He won the 2021 Jackson Painting Prize in the "Scenes of Everyday Life" category in London and was a finalist at the 18th Arte Laguna Prize in Venice. He also held a solo exhibition at the A. Kasteyev Museum in Almaty. He was included in the Forbes 30 under 30 list in Kazakhstan. Participated in the Akneye project and the 18th Arte Laguna Prize group exhibition as part of the parallel program of the 60th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy.

Nurbol Nurakhmet

Nurbol Nurakhmet works across painting, drawing, collage (analog and digital), lithography, and series-based installations to test how images construct memory and power. His figures—often nude, skinless, or otherwise “de-identified”—function as instruments rather than portraits, a way to strip away the noise of identity and look at structure: censorship and self-censorship, the import of Eurocentric canons onto the steppe, and the uneasy choreography of public space. Key bodies of work trace this inquiry: Censorship (2017) stages blindness as a modern condition; Missionaries (2016–18) and Keyhole (2018) pit classical models against autochthonous archetypes; Abay’s Room and Waiting Room (both 2018) compress cultural aspiration and suspended time; the cityscapes Wednesday / Thursday / Constellation (2018) read Almaty’s squares as postcards and protest sites at once; Birch Grove and Birch Grove. Kenesary (2016/2019) fold national myth into elegy; the triptych Searching for God (2018–19) and the collaborative handwritten book Qitap (2017) extend his interest in the body, belief, and reproduction of images. Throughout, Nurakhmet’s academically precise draftsmanship and cinematic light give clarity to a decolonial critique conducted through traditional media.

His work has been presented in institutional and international contexts including Eurasian Utopia: Postscriptum at Suwon I’Park Museum of Art (2018), At the Corner: City, Place, People at Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture, Almaty (2018), and Suns and Neons above Kazakhstan at YARAT Contemporary Art Space, Baku (2017). A solo project, Rasshcheplenie / Splitting (Aspan Gallery, 2019), consolidated series such as Abay’s Room, Missionaries, Keyhole, and Censorship, framing fragmentation as both method and thesis; and in 2023 Aspan Gallery presented his work at Contemporary Istanbul, where he showed the series Crossing Borders. He has also participated in thematic programs such as Deep Currents (IADA), extending his investigation of landscape, resource extraction, and the Anthropocene. Together these contexts situate Nurakhmet’s practice within a wider conversation about image, public space, and civic imagination in post-Soviet Central Asia.