Almaty (Kazakhstan). Inaugurated on September 12 in the former capital and first economic center of the country, the Almaty Museum of Arts constitutes to date the most ambitious initiative in favor of contemporary art in Kazakhstan. The city is also home to the Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture, another private institution, as well as the Abylkhan Kasteyev National Museum of Arts, founded in 1976 and currently closed for renovation. A few galleries complete this landscape, including Aspan, created in 2015 by Meruyert Kaliyeva, who has also been artistic director of the Almaty Museum of Arts since the launch of the project in 2020.
Nurlan Smagulov, owner of the museum, made his fortune in automobiles starting in the 1990s, before diversifying into commercial real estate in the 2000s. At the same time, the oligarch built up a collection of around 700 works, focusing on artists from Kazakhstan and Central Asia. First attracted by the creators of his own generation (he was born in 1965), he then turned to the first half of the 20th century, then to contemporary artists, including Western ones. His career illustrates the growing interest of Kazakh society in art and the rediscovery of its vernacular culture, after centuries-old Russian domination, from the imperial era to the fall of the USSR.
Reinvented traditions
Designed by the British agency Chapman Taylor, the building with a surface area of approximately 10,000 m² offers vast, modular and bright spaces. Its shapes recall the surrounding mountains, while reinterpreting the modernist heritage of the Soviet era. The temporary exhibition is dedicated to Almagul Menlibayeva, a native of Almaty. Born in 1969 and a member since 1987 of the Green Triangle, an underground group of artists from Almaty, she today divides her life between Berlin and her hometown. His work is resolutely plural: textiles, painting, sculpture, performance, photography, video, and more recently artificial intelligence. Designed by independent Thai curator Gridthiya Gaweewong, this retrospective retraces the stages of the artist’s career, first trained in textile arts in the 1980s, a freer field than painting and sculpture then subject to Soviet propaganda. Under the title “I understand everything”, based on one of her paintings from 1990, the exhibition puts into perspective the shock of the collapse of the USSR for a young artist who then becomes aware of having been cut off from the rest of the world as well as from her own culture, long marginalized. Menlibayeva also challenges certain taboos, notably that of nudity, through her photographs and videos inspired by indigenous Eurasian mythologies and nomadic, sometimes matriarchal cultures, rooted in Tengrism (or Tangraism), a belief system of the steppes of Central Asia based on animism and the cult of the celestial god Tengri. She reinvents these traditions in what she calls a “punk-romantic shamanism” (punkromantic shamanism) with feminist overtones.
Permanent exhibition gallery of the Almaty Museum of Art.
© Alexey Naroditsky
Cultural mixing
In the gallery of the permanent collection, the exhibition entitled “Qonaqtar” (“guests”) and designed by Latvian curator Inga Lace highlights the role of Kazakhstan as a territory of migration and cultural mixing. We can thus understand the distinction between “Kazakh artists”, attached to the majority ethnic group representing approximately two thirds of the population, and “Kazakhstani artists”, a term encompassing both Kazakhs and members of the country’s many other national and regional communities. The first artist to be collected by Smagulov, Serenjab Baldano (1930-2014), a self-taught sculptor, offers a striking example: originally from Buryatia (in Siberia, north of Mongolia), he works with wood following its natural veins and roughness in order to extract expressive mask-faces, in a vein close to outsider art.
The gallery also presents painters (Aisha Galimbaeva, Zhanatai Sharden, among others), textile artists (Alibay Bapanov, Dilyara Kaipova) as well as other sculptors (Rysbek Akhmetov, Georgii Tryakin-Bukharov) from the 20th and 21st centuries with strong stylistic originality. This suggests a vast potential to be explored, in order to highlight a singular artistic production, born at the crossroads of civilizations, spiritualities and Eurasian migratory movements.
The museum, however, gives an important place to Western art, considered as an attractive showcase for the local and international public, but sometimes at odds with its primary vocation: the highlighting of scenes from Central Asia. Thus, monumental sculptures by Jaume Plensa (see ill.), Alicja Kwade and Yinka Shonibare occupy the exteriors, while inside there is a ceramic fresco by Fernand Léger, The Women with the Parrot (1952-1953), as well as works by Anselm Kiefer, Yayoi Kusama, Bill Viola and Richard Serra. The presence of the latter is revealing: Smagulov admits to having been deeply inspired by his visit to the Guggenheim in Bilbao, which also presents a monumental installation by the American artist.
