One Steppe Forward*: Women Artists in Kazakhstan

On October 29, 2025, the Almaty Museum of Arts will host a joint event dedicated to exploring the histories of art and the practices of women artists in Kazakhstan. The event is organized in collaboration with a Paris-based organisation dedicated to advancing research on women artists AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Research & Exhibitions) and marks the beginning of collaboration between the two organizations.

During the event, art historian Dilyara Sharipova will present her research on women artists in Kazakhstan and will be joined in conversation by curators Matylda Taszycka and Carolina Hernández Muñoz from AWARE. Inga Lāce from the Almaty Museum of Arts will also introduce the women artists from the collection of the museum. The talks and conversation will be followed by a workshop led by architect and cultural activist Asel Yeszhanova. The workshop on craft and women’s solidarity will invite the participants to work with felt and learn about the connection between traditional crafts, music, and shared female experiences

What are the stories of Kazakhstan’s women artists and how do they echo across time? This event invites audiences to journey through the country’s artistic landscape as seen, felt and expressed through their eyes and voices. Have their gestures been overlooked, or have they simply spoken in other languages – through crafts or alternative mediums? Together, we will reflect on how these stories can be uncovered, retold, and reimagined, tracing methodologies of research, memory and artistic activation.

AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research & Exhibitions is a Paris–based international, non–profit organisation founded in 2014. Its mission is to collect and widely disseminate research on women and non-binary artists of the 15th to 21st centuries through the publication of texts on its website. This online resource presently contains 1,400 biographical texts and draws up to 80,000 visits per month. AWARE represents a diversity of voices with texts written by around 500 researchers, feminist art historians, art critics, and activists worldwide. Through this collaboration, new art-historical research will be commissioned on women artists represented in the collection of the Almaty Museum of Arts, including figures such as Aisha Galymbayeva and Almagul Menlibayeva. 

This event is part of a broader programme highlighting Kazakhstani women artists, conceived by Almaty Museum of Arts in collaboration with AWARE, with the financial support of the French Embassy in Kazakhstan. 

*This title comes from artist Saule Suleimenova’s 2019 eponymous work.

Dilyara Sharipova (Almaty) is an art historian whose research focuses on visual art in Kazakhstan from the 1930s to the 1950s, Kazakh theatre design, as well as contemporary sculpture, installation, graphic art, and comics of the 21st century. Her interests also include the theory and practice of women’s artistic creativity. In 1989, she graduated from the Department of Art History at the Faculty of History of Moscow State University named after M. Lomonosov, and in 1992 she completed the Higher Sociological Courses of the Sociological Association of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and the Institute of Youth. From 1998 to 2000, she worked at the Soros Center for Contemporary Art – Almaty. Between 1989 and 1996 and since 2007, she has worked at the M. Auezov Institute of Literature and Art. Sharipova holds a PhD in Art History (2007), has been an Associate Professor since 2020, and currently serves as a leading researcher and head of the Department of Fine Arts at the M. Auezov Institute of Literature and Art of the Committee of Science of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan. She is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and the Union of Experts (St. Petersburg). She is the author and co-author of the monographs Essays on Kazakh Fine Art: The Formative Period (1930s–1950s) (Almaty, 2008) and Abylkhan Kasteev (co-authored with R. Yergaliyeva, Almaty, 2014), and has also contributed to several collective monographs, including Visual Art of Kazakhstan in the Period of Independence (2009).

Asel Yeszhanova is an Almaty based architect and a cultural activist, whose professional journey revolves around active participation in the broader discourse on architecture and urbanism. She is particularly passionate about fostering design engagement among diverse audiences. Growing up at the gateway to the resettled agricultural Tselina (Virgin Lands), Asel also gained an early insight into Soviet social policy, and this interest in politics has stayed with her throughout her career. She has curated exhibitions and events on themes as diverse as Stalin’s repressions, skate culture, and labour migration. She is a co–founder and a Development Director of Public Foundation “Urban Forum Kazakhstan”. This organisation was the first to introduce the issues of urbanism and interdisciplinary approach to urban transformation in Kazakhstan. Now that Urban Forum Kazakhstan is growing and working steadily, she devotes more time to studying the traditional crafts of Kazakhstan, experimenting with the local materials and multidisciplinary collaborations. She was included in the Royal Institute of British Architects book 100 Women: Architects In Practice, highlighting 100 exceptional practising women architects contributing to our built environment. Asel has worked across three continents as an architect.

Matylda Taszycka is Head of Research Programmes at AWARE, where she leads initiatives, directs publications and oversees research focused on women and non-binary artists. Among other responsibilities, she coordinates the AWARE Prize for Women Artists. A graduate of the École du Louvre in Paris, she previously worked at the Monnaie de Paris, before joining the Polish Institute in Paris as Head of Visual Arts. Taszycka is also an independent curator and art critic. In 2023, she curated Wanda Czelkowska. Art Is Not Rest at the Museum Susch in Switzerland. More recently, she co-curated Trajectoires que je suis. Lauréates du prix d’honneur AWARE at the FRAC Champagne–Ardenne in Reims (2025, France). Since 2024, she has also been teaching the history and theory of contemporary art at the École du Louvre.

Carolina Hernández Muñoz is an art historian and curator based in Paris. She holds a Master's degree in contemporary art history from the University of Paris 1 – Panthéon–Sorbonne, specialising in Latinx, Latin American, and Caribbean performance art. She also holds a Bachelor’s in Latin American literature. She currently serves as the International Networks Manager at AWARE, where she fosters collaborations among non-profit organisations, independent art spaces, and museums to advance feminist and intersectional perspectives in the arts. Interested in art that revisits the colonial history of the Americas, Hernández Muñoz’s research explores anticolonial and decolonial practices in artistic production. This focus has led her to work on a project examining counter-commemorative art and exhibitions created in response to the Columbus Quincentenary from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s. She has previously worked with El Museo del Barrio in New York City and the performance space Le Générateur in Gentilly.

Inga Lāce is the Chief Curator of the Almaty Museum of Arts. She worked as Curator at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Arts between 2012 and 2020. Her research specialises in modern and contemporary art across Soviet and Post–Soviet Eastern Europe, Caucasus, and Central Asia as well as its diaspora, with a particular focus on migration and transnational connections. She was C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow at MoMA, New York (2020–2023) and has curated internationally, with previous projects including the Latvian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2019); Survival Kit (2017–23); Portable Landscapes at Villa Vassilieff, the Latvian National Art Museum and James Gallery at CUNY (2018); Latvian Collection at the Malmo Konstmuseum (2022) and New Visions – The Henie Onstad Triennial for Photography and New Media, Oslo (2023); Kaunas Biennial (2023), and Ljubljana biennale of Graphic Arts (2023).