Qonaqtar closing programme

Join us for the closing weekend of Qonaqtar, the Almaty Museum of Arts’ inaugural collection exhibition exploring hospitality, migration, memory, and shared histories in Kazakhstan. Over two days, the programme brings together artists, researchers, musicians, and visitors through guided tours, talks, workshops and performances, offering a final opportunity to experience the exhibition and reflect on the many stories it brings together.

Admission to all events in the closing program is free with a museum ticket, except for guided tours. Guided tour tickets can be purchased on the museum's website or at the ticket office.

August 9, Sunday

13.00-16.00

Aşyq Şeberhana: Qonaqtar Collages

Create your own paper collages inspired by the works on view in Qonaqtar, and experiment with shape, colour, and composition.

15.00-16.00

Lecture

Tattigul Kartayeva: Interpreting Wells: An Ethnoarchaeological Study of Traditional Groundwater Use

In Kazakh

This lecture explores traditional methods of engaging with groundwater in the steppe and arid regions of Kazakhstan, considering wells as carriers of ecological knowledge and cultural memory. Drawing on ethnographic and archaeological research, Tattigul Kartayeva will discuss the diversity of traditional wells, the technologies used to build them, water-use practices, and the knowledge of nomadic and semi-nomadic communities that has allowed life and movement in arid landscapes for centuries. The lecture invites us to see wells as part of a cultural landscape, holding the memory of a centuries-long relationship between people, water, and the steppe.

Tattigul Kartayeva is an ethnographer, ethnologist, and historical anthropologist, Professor in the Department of Archaeology, Ethnology, and Museology at al-Farabi Kazakh National University, and Candidate of Historical Sciences. Her research interests span cultural landscapes, the relationships between people, water, and the environment, intangible heritage, ethnoarchaeology, and the ecological knowledge of Kazakhstan’s nomadic communities.

She has led research projects on traditional water-supply methods in Kazakhstan’s arid regions, on the agricultural and pastoral landscapes of desert deltas, and on the role of animals in ancient and contemporary culture. Tattigul Kartayeva is the author of more than 300 scholarly and popular-science publications. For many years she has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the Syr Darya and Aral regions, as well as in the Kyzylkum desert.

16.30-18.30

Discussion

Hydro-Cosmology in Kazakhstan: Art, Ecology, and Infrastructures of Care

with Aigerim Kapar, Inga Lāce, Assiya Baqdaulet, and Bridget Peak

In collaboration with Artcom Platform

In Russian and English

Presented in collaboration with Artcom Platform's Art Collider × Water Futures school, Hydro-Cosmology in Kazakhstan: Art, Ecology, and Infrastructures of Care responds to the school’s call for shared responsibility in restoring relationships with water and imagining collective futures across the Ili–Balkhash Basin and beyond. The discussion takes place during the closing week of Qonaqtar, the museum's inaugural collection exhibition exploring hospitality, migration, memory, and shared histories in Kazakhstan.

Bringing together curatorial and artistic research perspectives, the discussion examines how water has been conceptualised, represented, and contested in modern and contemporary art from Kazakhstan. It traces artistic engagements with water—from local ecological knowledge and Soviet-era depictions of rivers, lakes, and industrial modernisation to recent practices that foreground the environmental crisis and memory. Water emerges as a site where competing narratives intersect: as a resource and commodity, as a carrier of cultural and cosmological meaning, and as a medium through which artists address the legacies of colonial infrastructure, extraction, and ecological degradation.

Focusing on water bodies and aquatic landscapes—particularly the Aral Sea, the Caspian Sea, and Lake Balkhash—the discussion explores how changing aquatic environments reveal broader hydrosocial processes and evolving relationships between communities, ecosystems, and water. Drawing on museum collections, Kazakh cinema, and long-term artistic initiatives, the panel proposes water as a framework for understanding questions of identity, care, responsibility, and planetary interdependence.

Aigerim Kapar (Artcom Platform)

This paper examines Lake Balkhash within the Ili–Balkhash basin as a hydrosocial system shaped by intersecting histories of Soviet colonial industrialization, post-independence extractive processes and ongoing climate pressures. It approaches the lake as a relational environment where water, memory, and power are continuously reconfigured through infrastructural interventions, ecological change, and everyday practices. The concept of hydrocosmology is developed to foreground water as a carrier of cultural knowledge and relational practices, drawing on nomadic epistemologies, embodied observation, and oral traditions that remain embedded in the steppe and lake environments. Drawing on the long-term initiative Care for Balkhash, the paper explores how care operates as an infrastructural practice that reconnects fragmented hydrocommunities and enables forms of translation between local knowledge and institutional governance.

Inga Lāce (Curator, Almaty Museum of Arts)

This talk looks at paintings from natural landscapes to industrial scenes, exploring how water has been represented in modern and contemporary art from Kazakhstan. From depictions of rivers, lakes, and the steppe’s scarce water sources in Soviet-era painting to works celebrating industry on rivers and lakes, to more conceptual and critical approaches in contemporary practices, water emerges as both material and symbol  of shifting historical and artistic contexts. Bringing together works from the collections of Almaty Museum of Arts, alongside broader regional practices, the presentation proposes water as a lens through which to understand the entanglement of landscape, identity, and history in Kazakhstan.

Dr. Assiya Baqdaulet (Film Scholar)

Water occupies a complex symbolic and aesthetic role in Kazakh cinema, functioning as both a material presence and a metaphorical device through which filmmakers explore identity, memory, and environmental transformation. This talk  examines how water is represented across key works of Kazakh film, from the late Soviet period to contemporary productions, situating these depictions within broader cultural and ecological contexts of the Central Asian steppe. In Kazakh cinema, water bodies often appear in tension with the dominant landscape of steppe. Rivers, lakes, and seas—are not merely geographic features but the unknown landscapes of inner worlds, as well as loss and transition. At the same time, water functions as a medium of introspection and spiritual reflection. In several films, scenes set near and under water mark moments of personal transformation or existential pause, aligning with broader poetic traditions in Central Asian art. Overall, the representation of water in Kazakh cinema reveals a layered visual language in which environmental, historical, and philosophical concerns converge.

Bridget Peak is a graduate of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. Her research interests relate to the inheritance of extractive industries in contemporary artistic practices. Taking inspiration from the munadara tradition of poetry, her recent research employs binarism as a heuristic, unsettling the conceptual dichotomization of a pearling era and oil modernity through attention to their period of overlap in the early twentieth century. She was Co-Editor of Thresholds: Record (MIT Press, 2026) and has written on art, architecture, and literature for The Markaz Review, Asymptote Journal, AGSI, and others.

19.00-20.00

Sound performance

Echoes of Water by Anuar Kaldekhan

An improvised sound performance inspired by water as a source of memory, movement, and listening. Through evolving textures of sound, silence, and resonance, the performance invites the audience to experience water not as an image, but as a living presence in constant transformation.

Anuar Kaldekhan is an independent Kazakh musician, composer, and sound artist whose work is rooted in the traditional philosophy of küy. Through guitar, voice, traditional instruments such as the dombra, qobyz, and sibyzgy, together with electronics and improvisation, he has developed a distinctive sonic language that bridges ancestral memory and contemporary expression. His practice reinterprets elements of Kazakh musical heritage through contemporary forms, exploring atmosphere, deep listening, ritual, and the relationship between sound, memory, and landscape. Since 2015, he has focused on solo and interdisciplinary practice, presenting work in museums, galleries, and experimental art contexts in Kazakhstan and internationally.

Kaldekhan previously performed with the band IZ and founded projects including AlaKan, Anuar & "7", and YELEs. Alongside his artistic practice, he has contributed to research and archival projects on Kazakh traditional music, including editorial work for the Tashi Folk Music Archive. His music has also featured in a project associated with the British Library's Dunhuang exhibition through the International Dunhuang Programme.