Qonaqtar marks the first major presentation of the Almaty Museum of Arts’ collection, tracing the thirty-year journey of collecting by the museum’s founder, Nurlan Smagulov.
Alongside the works from the museum’s collection, additional works by artists from the region, as well as new commissions, will be featured. Imagined as an exhibition on the move itself, works will be changed throughout a one-and-a-half-year period, also challenging the idea of the permanence of a museum collection.
Delving into themes of hospitality and migration unfolding across Kazakhstan and Central Asia, the exhibition was initially inspired by two paintings: Aisha Galymbayeva’s Shepherd’s Feast (1965) and Salikhitdin Aitbayev’s On the Virgin Lands. Lunchtime (1960s). Galymbayeva captures the joyful spirit of nomadic life, while Aitbayev references the Virgin Lands campaign – the Soviet plan to expand agriculture throughout the steppe, bringing in volunteers and displacing thousands across Kazakhstan.
Salikhitdin Aytbayev
On Virgin Soil. Lunchtime, 1960s
The title Qonaqtar (Қонақтар), meaning ‘guests’ in Kazakh, stems from the Turkic root ‘qon-’ (‘to stop for a night’). It embodies the deep-rooted tradition of welcoming guests with warmth and respect but also evokes the act of travelling long distances to find shelter in someone else’s yurt – a necessity in vast, often harsh landscapes. Hospitality was thus a fundamental law of the steppe: communal living, sharing meals, stories and music formed an important part of that. This custom was passed down from generation to generation, shaping a cultural code inherited from the ancestors.
Guests, of course, can come in many guises, and hospitality is not always voluntary. From granting Kazakh pasturelands to the settlers from the European parts of the Russian Empire – from the 19th century onwards – to the mass displacement of Koreans and other groups to Central Asia in the 1930s and the exile of Soviet dissidents to the Karaganda and Akmola regions, these histories have left lasting marks on the region’s society and art. While many people arrived in Kazakhstan as outsiders, generations have since made it their home.
Sakhi Romanov
On a Visit. 1967
Sakhi Romanov
Yurt II. 1964
Besides these stories, the exhibition opens up other threads in the collection: landscape and cosmology, reflections on language, the role of women, and nodes of transnational solidarity. It includes works by contemporary artists and reaches back to the 1940s, but is shaped most significantly by the 1960s, when a new generation of artists, the Sixtiers, emerged during the Khrushchev Thaw. While still navigating Soviet restrictions, they crafted a modern national visual language rooted in local heritage and nomadic culture, yet open to global modernist influences.
Artists
Shyngys Aidarov
Erbossyn Meldibekov
Yelena and Viktor Vorobyev
Almagul Menlibayeva
Said Atabekov
Curators
Inga Lāce is CMAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow at MoMA. She has been a curator at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art since 2012 and was curator of the Latvian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2019 with the artist Daiga Grantina (co-curated with Valentinas Klimašauskas).
Partners
See also
Related events
Explore the collection with a guide
Tours
Every Sunday, free
Audio tour
Tours
Every Sunday, free
