The Almaty Museum of Arts opens with a programme conceived as a festival – a living rite of coming together, marking the beginning of a shared community around the museum.
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.
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.
Salikhitdin Aytbayev
On Virgin Soil. Lunchtime, 1960s
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.
Sakhi Romanov
On a Visit. 1967
Sakhi Romanov
Yurt II. 1964
The exhibition includes work by contemporary artists and reaches back to the 1940s, but is shaped most significantly by the 1960s. This period saw artists crafting a national artistic language that defined modern Kazakh identity, drawing from local folklore, nomadic culture, daily rituals and celebrations while remaining open to global modernist influences, navigating both the pressures of Soviet restrictions and the rich artistic heritage of Central Asia.
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).
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