Where Wings Grow: New Show at Aspan Gallery, Almaty

Let’s move Aspan Gallery from name to place, from reputation to reality. As one of the Kazakh galleries most visible on the fair circuit, known for its impeccable presentations and strong roster of Central Asian artists, visiting its headquarters in Almaty felt almost inevitable. It didn’t disappoint. Tucked into the underground floor of a shopping complex in a leafy area of Almaty, where you might catch a glimpse of a stylish passerby balancing a matcha cup before descending the stairs, the gallery unfolds as a quiet enclave. There, Where Wings Grow opens as a multifaceted meditation on the cycles of nature, and particularly on the steppe, explored by several Central Asian artists through ecological, historical, and mythic lenses. What emerges is not a nostalgic portrait of a nomadic past but a layered reflection on resilience and renewal. At the center of the curatorial vision is Alan Medoev, the archaeologist whose 1960s expeditions uncovered hundreds of sites across the Kazakh steppe. His discoveries challenged Soviet portrayals of the region as an empty expanse and instead presented it as a cradle of memory. The exhibition extends that lineage, tracing how the steppe continues to act as an archive where cultural, personal, and ecological time intersect. The installation is clean and deliberate: suspended collages, unframed paintings, and subtle shifts in light. Walking through, one feels the exhibition itself has been conceived as a kind of landscape. [caption id="attachment_37355" align="aligncenter" width="1920"] Where Wings Grow, installation view; image: Theo Frost[/caption] The Interplay Between Distance and Proximity This quality resonated strongly when encountering the works. At a distance, some pieces seemed almost naïve or casual in their painterly surfaces, but up close, their textures, materials, and embedded details revealed far more intricate worlds. This is true of Saule Suleimenova’s Plasticographies (two works titled Zhana Omir – New Life and Steppe Romanticism). From afar, they appear to be simple, even sentimental landscapes. Up close, however, they are revealed as collages of discarded plastic: fragments of packaging, commercial logos, counterfeit brands, and old ID cards. Suleimenova, who grew up in Almaty and trained as an architect before turning to socially engaged art, calls plastic “a treasure” and uses it to question both waste and memory. Within these luminous surfaces are startling details such as embryonic forms and small figures hidden in the texture. These unsettling images evoke new generations coming into a world shaped by waste, suggesting both renewal and ecological crisis. Steppe Romanticism distills the landscape into minimal horizons and contemplative silence. Yet knowing it is made of plastic prevents forgetting the contradiction, serenity marked by civilization’s residue. It recalls how landscapes themselves operate, inviting from afar but, up close, layered with scars, residues, and histories. [caption id="attachment_37353" align="aligncenter" width="2560"] Moldakul Narymbetov, "Untitled"; image: Aspan Gallery.[/caption] In a similar spirit, Moldakul Narymbetov’s paintings establish the exhibition’s tone. A founding member of the radical Kyzyl Tractor collective and one of the central figures in Kazakh contemporary art, Narymbetov (1948–2012) was known for fusing folklore, shamanic motifs, and gestural abstraction....