Almaty, 20 August 2026. On 8 September  2026, Almaty Museum of Arts (ALMA) will open one of the major exhibitions of the new season, Müsinder: Sculpture in Kazakhstan from the 1950s to the Present Day Curated by Dr. Aliya de Tiesenhausen, the exhibition will be one of the central events marking ALMA’s first anniversary. The exhibition partner is Atasu Group.

Presented in the Saryarka Hall, the exhibition will bring together more than fifty works by key artists from several generations, including Khakimzhan Nauryzbayev, Isaac Itkind, Erkin Mergenov, Rysbek Akhmetov, Moldaqul Narymbetov, and Aïda Adilbek. Organized into four thematic sections, the exhibition is the most extensive research project in recent decades dedicated to the development of sculpture in Kazakhstan, spanning the academic traditions of the Soviet period towards the experiments by contemporary artists.

“We sought to present sculpture as a living artistic process. At the exhibition, academic works from the Soviet period enter into dialogue with works by contemporary artists, revealing how materials, artistic language, and the very understanding of sculptural form have evolved. The history of sculpture is at the same time a history of society, memory, and the human being,” says Dr. Aliya de Tiesenhausen, curator of the exhibition.

“The Kazakh word müsin has a dual meaning: it refers both to ‘sculpture’ and to ‘the human figure’,” says Meruyert Kaliyeva, Artistic Director of ALMA. “The human figure becomes the central subject of the exhibition. Through it, artists reflect on memory, family, history, national identity, and the social changes Kazakhstan has experienced over the past seventy years.”

The partnership with Atasu Group underscores the significance of the exhibition. The company has long supported initiatives dedicated to preserving and reinterpreting Kazakhstan’s artistic heritage. As the company’s founder, Marat Zhuman, noted:

“Atasu has been in logistics for twenty-eight years. We connect countries. But simply creating a route is not enough. A true connection happens between people. And that is no longer about logistics. That is why we are here. We are doing what we know how to do. We connect. Only this time, it is not cities we are connecting, but people. Müsinder presents seven decades of Kazakhstani sculpture, from the 1950s to the present day. It shows how the country has changed. How we ourselves have changed. It is also a kind of route, only through time.”

The exhibition Müsinder will run from 8 September 2026 until May 2027. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue in Kazakh, Russian, and English, featuring scholarly texts by the exhibition’s curator Dr. Aliya de Tiesenhausen and art historians Valeriya Ibrayeva and Alexandra Tsay.