Details and Schedule
September 2025
Almaty Museum of Arts
Opening Live Programme
The Almaty Museum of Arts opens with a programme conceived as a festival – a living rite of coming together, giving rise to a community around the museum.
The Opening Live Programme is curated by Anne Davidian.
Drawing on the museum’s location on Al-Farabi Street, named after the 9th-century philosopher and author of The Great Book of Music, and on the tradition of the aqyns – Central Asia’s poet-storytellers – the programme unfolds as a layered composition, each event a distinct timbre within a shared rhythm.
Almaty Museum of Arts
Performances, screenings, conversations and communal moments move from celebration to stillness, from public energy to attentive presence, opening space for altered tempos and listening that unsettles the familiar. Here begins a practice of imagination – an invitation to slow down, tune into subtle inflections and give form to what resists the scripted.
As a gesture of hospitality to the city, this cross-cultural programme opens the museum to meaningful encounters, where enduring connections with its audiences can take root. Such shared moments weave the museum into Almaty’s cultural fabric – a fresh pulse amid the city’s evolving story.
Tuesday, September 9
17:00
Doors open
17:20 – 17:45 | Art Street
Nefeli Papadimouli, Dream Coat, performed in collaboration with Jolda
Can dreaming become a collective act, conjuring an ephemeral community? Performed at sunset, a choreographic script shaped by ‘dreamstorming’ sessions, where participants share recurring dreams, draws on visions that migrate across bodies, places and times, persisting beyond any single self. Moving from dispersal to convergence, professional and amateur dancers in hand-painted modular costumes – each evoking a phase of the solar cycle – assemble into temporary architectures of togetherness.
Nefeli Papadimouli is a Greek artist based in Paris who views her works as poetic exercises, engaging bodies through sculptural ‘action generators’ that provoke collective negotiations of distance and proximity. Jolda is a contemporary dance theatre from Almaty.
17:45 – 18:15 | Art Street
Opening Ceremony
18:45 – 19:30 | Al-Farabi Hall
Andrius Arutiunian, Kayīb, performance
A composition for live electronics and seven brass discs, each acting as an individual sound transmitter. Arutiunian constructs a series of hypnotic and repetitive sonic gestures to explore gharīb – a concept of strangeness drawn from musical and political peripheries. Kayīb is a study of sonic attunement and dissonance, heard through resonances and spectral registers.
Andrius Arutiunian is an Armenian-Lithuanian artist and composer working with hybrid forms of listening, vernacular knowledges and contemporary cosmologies.
19:45 – 20:30 | Art Street
Inaugural Concert with Mamer, Steppe Sons, Hey Monro
The concert reimagines Kazakh musical traditions through contemporary sound. Mamer, a multi-instrumentalist and acclaimed modern master of Kazakh folk experimentation from Xinjiang, China, forges a sonic language that transcends boundaries, spanning ambient, industrial, drone, and improvisation. Steppe Sons, an alternative folk ensemble from Almaty, compose new works on traditional Kazakh instruments, merging cultural lineage with modern ethno-jazz. Hey Monro, a rising voice in Kazakhstan’s pop and indie scenes, translates vernacular resonance into a contemporary sensibility.
Artist and writer based in New York, Jace Clayton, also known as DJ /rupture, has for nearly three decades created adventurous DJ sets that integrate sounds from the global South with the latest developments in electronic music. He is the author of Uproot: Travels in 21st Century Music and Digital Culture.
20:45 – 21:45 | Art Street
Jace Clayton, Gel and Weave, performance
Wednesday, September 10
12:00 | Art Street
Welcome
12:45 – 13:30 | Art Street
Jolda, Amandasu, performance
In Kazakh, Amandasu means ‘to greet each other,’ literally ‘to wish one another safety and well-being.’ This spirit shapes the performance, as dancers welcome the public with gestures rooted in ancient traditions of hospitality, reimagined through a contemporary choreographic language. The work opens with a collective greeting before guiding the audience into the exhibition spaces of the new museum.
One of Central Asia’s leading experimental independent theatres of contemporary dance, Jolda creates original auteur performances and runs dance laboratories for research and exchange.
Meruyert Kaliyeva
Artistic Director
Inga Lāce
Chief Curator
Dr. Christianna Bonin
Professor of Art History, American University of Sharjah
15:00 – 15:45 | Al-Farabi Hall
In Conversation
16:00 – 16:45 | Al-Farabi Hall
In Conversation
Almagul Menlibayeva
Artist
Gridthiya Gaweewong
Artistic Director of the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok and curator of the artist’s retrospective I Understand Everything
17:00 – 17:45 | Al-Farabi Hall
Artist Talk: Kira Perov
Australian-born Kira Perov is the director of Bill Viola Studio, Long Beach, California. From 1979, she worked closely with her husband, artist Bill Viola, managing and creatively guiding the production of his groundbreaking video works and installations. She has edited all of Viola’s publications and continues to curate, organise and coordinate exhibitions of his art worldwide. Bill Viola’s seminal 1994 video installation Stations is featured in the museum’s inaugural Artist Rooms display.
18:00 – 18:45 | Al-Farabi Hall
Artist Talk: Jaume Plensa
Jaume Plensa is an internationally renowned sculptor celebrated for his public artworks which are visible in major museums and cities worldwide. Over more than four decades, he has developed a practice that explores themes of spirituality, silence and collective memory through large-scale sculptures, installations and works on paper. His twelve-metre female portrait Nades, commissioned by the Almaty Museum of Arts, welcomes visitors outside the museum.
20:00 – 20:40 | Al-Farabi Hall
Tomoko Sauvage, Waterbowls, performance
Inspired by the South Indian Jaltarang – a percussion composed of ceramic or metal bowls filled with water – yet radically reimagined, Tomoko Sauvage has developed a singular instrumentarium: an aqueous electroacoustic set-up born of years of experimentation with materials, resonance and feedback. Water-filled porcelain vessels amplified with hydrophones come alive as she tunes and plays with droplets, ripples, stones and shells. In this fragile architecture of impermanence – where pitch shifts with evaporation – she makes audible vibrations that normally remain below the threshold of hearing, evoking elemental memories of rain, waves and the pulse of Almaty’s aryqs – waterways threading the city.
Tomoko Sauvage is a Paris-based Japanese composer and artist whose work centres on the tactile materiality of resonant objects, metaphorical listening and the use of chance as a compositional method.
With works by Basma al-Sharif, Saodat Ismailova, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Constantin Jopeck, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Apichatpong Weerasethakul
From dreamlike journeys into Gaza through binaural self-hypnosis – crossing borders the body cannot – to the haunted return of the Turkestan tiger, driven to extinction by colonial conquest; from hallucinatory visions in a museum open during the darkness of Lebanon’s power cuts to dissolution of boundaries between species and ecologies; to lightning inscribed directly onto film – these works open a space where beauty endures in altered form: a defiance, a counter-imagination against the machinery of erasure.
Constantin Jopeck
Artist
Joana Hadjithomas
Artist
Khalil Joreige
Artist
Saodat Ismailova
Artist
Basma al-Sharif
Artist
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Artist
Daniel Steegmann Mangrané
Artist
Still from Deep Sleep (Basma Alsharif, 2014).
Courtesy of the artist.
21:00 – 22:30 | Al-Farabi Hall
Crossings, artist film screenings
Still from Deep Sleep (Basma al-Sharif, 2014).
Courtesy of the artist.
23:00 – 01:00 | Various spaces across the museum
Midnight Practice, performance
Anania Shirakatsi, 7th century, Bolorakner (Phases of the Moon)
Anania Shirakatsi, 7th century, Bolorakner (Phases of the Moon)
Andrius Arutiunian
Artist
Jace Clayton
Artist
Kokonja
Artist
Makpal Manasbay
Artist
Mamer
Artist
Akezhan Taubaldy
Artist
Tomoko Sauvage
Artist
With Andrius Arutiunian, Jace Clayton, Kokonja, Makpal Manasbay, Mamer, Akezhan Taubaldy (Steppe Sons), Tomoko Sauvage.
Inspired by a legend of Sufi musicians who could play a certain kind of music only after midnight, the performance transforms this temporal frontier into a collective sonic exploration. Set across seven different points of the new museum building, artists shape aural dialogues while calling in the acoustic spirits of the site. Remnants of musical memories, resonances, loops and decelerations intertwine. This is not a concert. No solos, no final forms; sounds unfold as a hypnotic, meditative practice. The museum itself changes character – hushed and tuned for focused listening – as guests and musicians move freely, linger or drift into a state of trance together.
In this closing sequence of the opening programme, the artists assemble once more for a final performance, joined by two Kazakh artists: Makpal Manasbay, a musician who explores the sonic and spiritual depth of the kobyz – a traditional Central Asian string instrument, known for its raw, almost voice-like timbre – and Kokonja, an artist who shapes evolving soundscapes from the winds of the steppe, captured as they play through resonant bodies.
Midnight Practice is co-organised with Andrius Arutiunian.
Kindly note that seating for talks, performances and screenings is limited; we encourage early arrival to secure your place.