Kazakh Art - The Times Of Central Asia

Viewing results 1 - 6 of 17

Saiga

Prince William Praises Kazakhstan’s Saiga Recovery

Britain’s Prince William has highlighted Kazakhstan’s success in restoring its saiga antelope population, crediting government support for the animal’s recovery during an appearance on The Graham Norton Show. Asked about the distinctive antelope and the Altyn Dala conservation initiative, William said the species had recovered from critically endangered status to large numbers. Kazakhstan’s government had recognized the animal’s importance to the country and to conservation, he said: “They threw their full weight behind it.” Video: The Graham Norton Show / So Television / BBC The exchange came during an Earthshot Prize edition of the BBC chat show broadcast on October 23, with a photograph of a saiga displayed in the studio. William appeared alongside actors Cate Blanchett and Hannah Waddingham and conservationist Robert Irwin. Altyn Dala won the 2024 Earthshot Prize in the Protect and Restore Nature category, receiving £1 million to support its work. The initiative helps restore Kazakhstan’s vast steppe ecosystems, with the saiga’s recovery among its most prominent achievements. In an October 2025 update, Earthshot said Altyn Dala had helped the saiga population grow from around 40,000 to more than four million over two decades. The recovery followed a steep decline caused by poaching and disease. The initiative brings together Kazakhstan’s government and the Association for the Conservation of Biodiversity of Kazakhstan, with international conservation partners. Its work includes tracking saiga movements to help protect breeding and feeding grounds. Altyn Dala has also helped return endangered Przewalski’s horses to Kazakhstan, extending its restoration work beyond the antelope that drew attention on Norton’s sofa. Separately, King Charles III sent President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev a congratulatory telegram for Kazakhstan’s Republic Day, according to an October 25 statement from Akorda. The king praised the friendship between the two countries and reaffirmed his commitment to expanding bilateral cooperation.

Art and Culture

Threading a New Canon: Interview with Batima Zaurbekova

How does an artist born in a remote village in Kazakhstan become one of the country’s most recognized artists? “I realised that if I put in the work, I can achieve everything,” says Batima Zaurbekova, a pioneer of Kazakh tapestry, as she walks through Threads of Heritage at the Abylkhan Kasteyev National Museum of Arts in Almaty. The exhibition runs from September 25 to November 8, 2026. An energetic lady with a strong personality and a playful attitude, Zaurbekova is the subject of a retrospective marking her 80th birthday and consecrating a lifetime of artistic production, at a time when Kazakhstan, event after event, is gaining ever greater international cultural recognition. Video: TCA. Narration: Naima Morelli. It is indeed a momentous time to be in the art world in Kazakhstan. At the forefront of the discourses on de-coloniality in the arts, and among those contributing to a new canon of contemporary art, Kazakh artists like Zaurbekova embody what is truest to their culture and local specificity, letting it flow in the global discourse. [caption id="attachment_58628" align="alignnone" width="936"] Detail of Batima Zaurbekova’s The Bride’s Farewell (2003). Credit: Naima Morelli.[/caption] The passion with which Zaurbekova describes even the smallest technical details reveals her deep love for weaving. That devotion is also a political stance in the face of the Western canon of art history. The reclamation of an art canon which would belong to Central Asia started in the second half of the 20th century, when artists worldwide challenged the relegation of textiles to the category of craft. Starting from the very local arts of felt and weaving, and against the canon of Soviet painting, a generation of artists recovered something that was truly theirs and called it by its name: not simply craft, but art in its own right, with Zaurbekova at the heart of that movement. [caption id="attachment_58629" align="alignnone" width="2560"] Entrance display for Threads of Heritage at the Abylkhan Kasteyev National Museum of Arts in Almaty. Credit: Kirill Fedorov.[/caption] A matriarchal line While today biennales and fair around the world look for those artists whose cultural background is legible in their art, it wasn’t always like that. When Zaurbekova began weaving in the late 1960s, her teachers strongly discouraged her from devoting herself to weaving. Her teachers, many of whom had trained in Leningrad and Moscow, saw her as a painter, at a time when textiles were still considered a “lower” type of art, and far too slow and demanding. “I’d spend fifteen hours every day for days on end working on just one tapestry, and my teachers would tell me: ‘It’s so slow! In the same amount of time you could have painted three paintings already!” she tells me, laughing. They used to scold her with a Kazakh saying for it: “You’re digging a huge well with a small needle.” Zaurbekova was born in 1946 in Furmanovka, in the Moiynkum district of the Jambyl region, and grew up in Merke, where her family moved when she was in fifth...

Venice Biennale

A Polyphonic Process: Kazakhstan at the 2026 Venice Biennale

"There is a Kazakh proverb that says: a foolish person arrives with noise, sweeping everything away in their path, while a wise person arrives quietly, carefully observing the world around them." Syrlybek Bekbota, the curator of the Kazakhstan Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale – the most important art event in the world – offers me this thought at the dawn of the exhibition's opening, and it feels like both a manifesto and an omen. The theme of the pavilion is perfectly in line with the overarching curatorial theme, In Minor Keys, conceived by the late Cameroonian-Swiss curator Koyo Kouoh, who tragically passed away before the Biennale opened. And yet the controversies around this edition contradicted this minor key premise, instead turning it into a highly political event: the jury's resignation, widespread protests against the participation of Israel and Russia, rallies against the exploitation of art workers. The Kazakh pavilion was not immune to controversies itself, after artist Äsel Kadyrhanova's installation Machine (2013) – a meditation on Stalin-era repression featuring a vintage typewriter, Soviet-era arrest warrants, and red thread – was dismantled before the exhibition opened. However, on the day of the pavilion inauguration itself, no trace of the controversies was visible inside the high-ceilinged space. Listening to the Quiet Housed within the Museo Storico Navale near the Arsenale entrance, Qoñyr: The Archive of Silence marks Kazakhstan's third participation in the International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, and its most ambitious yet. It is also worth noting that it is the first time a Central Asian nation has selected its pavilion curator and artists through an open call – open to citizens of Kazakhstan, with priority given to those currently living and working in the country. It is a deliberate emphasis on rootedness rather than the diaspora-friendly internationalism that, for better or worse, dominates many national pavilions. The exhibition centres around the word qoñyr, a key term in Kazakh cosmology. While its literal meaning refers to the colour brown, qoñyr carries a far richer metaphorical significance: it can describe a sonic register, the scent of earth, or a form of silence with deeply embodied meaning. It is the attentiveness to minor vibrations – the wind, the breath, a footstep – that renders audible what is usually displaced by noise. The pavilion takes its cue from a traditional Kazakh instrumental composition of the same name by the twentieth-century composer Äbiken Khasenov, whose work embodies a broader cultural shift: as cultural theorist Zira Nauryzbay has noted, Kazakh music before the twentieth century was predominantly composed in major keys, while the century's upheavals – Soviet occupation, famine, mass deportations – precipitated a distinctive turn toward minor tonalities. That sonic transformation is the exhibition's guiding metaphor. "In periods of global instability, attention is often drawn to loud events and immediate reactions," the curator Bekbota explains. "Within this atmosphere of noise, personal memory, everyday experience, and quieter forms of knowledge can easily remain unnoticed." His curatorial wager is that restraint, rather than volume, can...

Art and Culture

Central Asia Steps Out of the Post-Soviet Shadow

Central Asia is rarely presented on its own terms. It is more often viewed through exterior lenses like Russian imperial memory, Chinese reach, Silk Road romance, or great-power rivalry. The result is a region made to look secondary to the forces around it, even as its five countries carry deep histories, distinct languages, and identities that cannot be reduced to a backdrop. That old frame is starting to crack. Central Asia is finding new ways to tell its own story. The shift goes beyond tourism or national branding. It is about who gets to define the region, which is still too often seen through the things done to it or extracted from it. Culture depicts the other side of that narrative, a place that has shaped history, not merely endured it, with traditions and ideas that have long carried influence far beyond its borders. [caption id="attachment_49147" align="aligncenter" width="2048"] Sky above Almaty: Qandy Qantar; image courtesy of Saule Suleimenova[/caption] Kazakhstan offers one visible example. The Almaty Museum of Arts opened on September 12, 2025, adding a major institution for modern and contemporary art. Its arrival builds on a broader shift in which private galleries, international platforms, and artists such as Aigerim Karibayeva and Saule Suleimenova are moving Kazakh art beyond folkloric shorthand toward identity, postcolonial memory, and urban life. The reopening of the Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture, in a former Soviet-era cinema, adds a sharper symbolic layer. A building once tied to Soviet public culture has become a platform for modern Central Asian voices, reflecting a scene increasingly rethinking nomadism rather than simply reproducing it. [caption id="attachment_49148" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Image: The Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture[/caption] Uzbekistan has made culture central to its international reemergence. The inaugural Bukhara Biennial brought contemporary art into a city more often seen through its monuments, turning madrasas and caravanserais into exhibition spaces for Uzbek and world artists. The same push is visible in the Tashkent Centre for Contemporary Art, Uzbekistan’s presence at the Venice Architecture Biennale, and design projects such as When Apricots Blossom, which link heritage, craft, and the environmental disaster of the Aral Sea. Artists such as Oyjon Khayrullaeva show a younger generation reworking Islamic ornament, textiles, and public space into new visual languages. At the same time, the State Museum of Karakalpakstan in Nukus, with its Soviet-era censored works, gives the country’s art history deeper heft. In Tashkent, the Islamic Civilization Center is working on a different scale. Recognized by Guinness World Records in 2026 as the largest museum of Islamic civilization, it gives Uzbekistan a stronger role in shaping how that legacy is understood today. [caption id="attachment_49146" align="aligncenter" width="2048"] Image courtesy of Oyjon Khayrullaeva[/caption] Kyrgyzstan’s confidence rests on different ground. The sixth World Nomad Games are scheduled for August 31 to September 6, 2026, with events in Bishkek and around Issyk-Kul. That gives Kyrgyzstan a stage for living nomadic traditions, not a static museum display of them. Its contemporary art scene adds a more intimate layer, with artists such as...

Kazakh Art

Unbent, Unbowed, Unbroken: The Art of Saule Suleimenova

“I’m a very emotional person,” says artist Saule Suleimenova with a bright, open laugh from her home studio in Almaty. Widely recognized as one of the most significant Kazakh artists working today, Suleimenova’s spontaneity and passion emerge clearly as the artist lightens up when talking about the joy and necessity of making work, when she excavates memories of the early days of making art, or when suddenly, she grows gloomy, remembering some of the most painful moments in the history of her country. Behind her back stands a large canvas, where translucent elements, almost resembling stained glass from a distance, slowly reveal themselves as fragments of discarded plastic bags fused together through heat and a whole lot of patience. Born in 1970, Suleimenova has developed a practice that spans painting, drawing, photography, and public art, consistently navigating the delicate and often hard to define boundary between personal memory and collective history: “I feel my personal life can’t be detached from politics and everything that happens around me,” she says, embodying, in a way, a motto from the seventies: “the personal is political.” Suleimenova was an early member of the Green Triangle Group, an experimental artist collective known for its avant-garde and punk-influenced art, which emerged during the Perestroika era and the collapse of the USSR, playing a significant role in revolutionizing contemporary art in Kazakhstan. Today, she is working mostly with archives, vernacular imagery, and the visual language of contemporary urban space. In her work, she investigates how narratives are formed, distorted, and even rewritten over time, particularly within the historical and political context of Kazakhstan. An example is her ongoing series, Cellophane Paintings, composed entirely from used plastic bags, transforming everyday waste into luminous, layered pictorial fields that hold together subjects as vast as socio-political trauma, from the Kazakh famine of 1930–1933, human rights violations, Karlag, one of the largest Gulag labor camps, and the Uyghur genocide. Those heavy themes are associated with some that are more intimate: family members, flowers, and cityscapes. Suleimenova is currently participating in the Union of Artists at the Center of Modern Culture Tselinny in Almaty (15 January – 19 April 2026), curated by Vladislav Sludsky, an exhibition reflecting on artistic partnerships as systems of survival in a region where art historically survived through shared spaces and personal alliances between artists, rather than institutional support. The Times of Central Asia spoke to Suleimenova about memory, material, and the ways personal experience and political history converge in her art. [caption id="attachment_42718" align="aligncenter" width="2500"] From the series, One Step Forward[/caption] TCA: Your recent work at the Bukhara Biennial, Portraits of the people of Bukhara, was made from polyethylene bags collected by the community itself. Can you tell me how your work on this project took shape? Suleimenova: From the beginning, the work was meant to be collaborative with local artists or artisans rather than something already finished and brought from outside. I decided to collaborate with a folk ensemble of Bukhara women - the retired performers...

Kazakh Art

Beyond the Yurt: Rethinking Nomadism in Kazakh Contemporary Art

At a moment when Kazakhstan is building new cultural institutions and asking bigger questions about what contemporary art should do, one curator has been quietly learning how power, taste, and narrative are shaped inside major museums. Akmaral Kulbatyrova, the first representative of Kazakhstan to receive the U.S.-based ArtTable Fellowship, spent 2025 working in the Exhibitions and Curatorial Projects Department at The Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, gaining rare inside access to how global exhibitions are conceived and positioned. Her work sits at the intersection of institutional practice and cultural repair, focused on reframing nomadic culture, Central Asian heritage, and Kazakh craft not as static tradition but as a current language. Akmaral’s experience links ambition and execution, showing how local histories can enter international spaces without being flattened. In this interview with The Times of Central Asia, we asked her what comes next. TCA: Nomadic imagery has become central to Kazakhstan’s national identity since independence. How are contemporary artists reshaping these symbols, and why does that matter for how the country sees itself today? AK: Kazakh contemporary artists briefly challenged Kazakh art in early avant-garde experiments in the 1960s. However, it stopped because of the huge presence of Socialist Realism, which was one of the movements where symbols like horses and yurts prevailed. Most of the contemporary artists reshape not the symbols; they reimagine nomadic culture, contextualizing pre-Soviet culture through researching how it changed over time. Many artists look back to pre-Soviet nomadic practices to explore how these traditions were disrupted by colonial and Soviet policies, yet continue to influence Kazakh identity today. By using installation, performance, and video, they move beyond decoration and folklore to show nomadism as a living culture rather than a museum image or symbols. This matters because it helps Kazakhstan see itself not through simplified national symbols, but as a society shaped by change, cultural mixing, and an ongoing negotiation between past and present. [caption id="attachment_42899" align="aligncenter" width="1536"] Qyz Zhibek, designed by Nikolai Vladimirovich Tsivchinsky and Moldakhmet Syzdykovich Kenbaev, 1971; image: TCA[/caption] TCA: Nomadism now circulates widely in pop culture, often detached from its historical meaning. Why does contemporary art provide a more critical way to examine what nomadic identity represents? AK: It’s typical that symbolic images prevail in pop culture, especially for countries that have not experienced a long artistic tradition. It is one of the ways to be acknowledged by the privileged cultures through the symbols that are easy to recognize and quickly signal national identity. In Kazakhstan, these images became important after independence, as they cover the main question of cultural uniqueness after colonial influence. Contemporary art takes slower and more contextual approaches rather than easy recognition. That’s why most modern scholars criticize symbolic language and would like to see art that explores unresolved histories and how nations were challenged or used their experience to construct their identity. [caption id="attachment_42900" align="aligncenter" width="750"] Anvar Musrepov, IKEA KZ; image courtesy of the Aspan Gallery[/caption] TCA: Many artists use nomadic motifs with irony rather...