Kazakhstan’s New Almaty Museum of Arts Focuses on Art of Central Asia

In a highly anticipated moment for the Kazakhstan cultural scene, the Almaty Museum of Arts (ALMA) opened its doors to the public on September 12 anchoring the country’s vibrant artistic legacy.

As the country’s first private museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art, the sleek new museum will showcase the collection of its founder, the auto and real estate tycoon Nurlan Smagulov, whose holdings number over 700 artworks by Kazakh and Central Asian artists, as well as international artists.

Located in the country’s largest city and former capital, ALMA is a minimalist monument that blends modern urbanism with natural beauty. Made from two interlocking L-shaped structures, one clad in warm-toned limestone, the other in aluminum, the building is light-filled and full of sharp angles and loft ceilings, echoing the Tian Shan Mountains just behind the museum.  

Led by artistic director Meruyert Kaliyeva and chief curator Inga Lāce, the museum’s permanent collection will be displayed via group exhibitions, solo shows, collaborations, and research projects. The museum’s main goal is to give a platform to the region’s underrepresented artistic creators, both past and present, while exploring cultural exchange with global audiences and institutions.

“We aim to foster curiosity, dialogue, and global engagement with the cultural wealth of Central Asia,” Kaliyeva told ARTnews. “The opening program of exhibitions and performances brings together artists across generations: those who laid the foundations of modern art in the region and courageously began asking questions about national identity, at a time when such inquiries could lead to persecution under the Soviet regime, and those who are redefining its future today.”

The museum, she said, is rooted “in local histories while reaching out to global perspectives” as a way “to build a space where art can be both a reflection and a catalyst for change.”

The opening roster of exhibitions and activations offer a deep dive into the local art scene, while still offering context for those encountering Kazakh art for the first time. Among these is the first-ever retrospective of Almaty-born artist Almagul Menlibayeva, whose work Smagulov first acquired 30 years ago. The survey, titled “I Understand Everything,” looks at her four-decade career, beginning in 1980s.

Her photographs, which she took up as her medium in 2010 after starting as a painter, explore women, ecology, identity politics, and Central Asian mythology in a post-Soviet, neo-colonial context. Drawing on shamanic symbols, Tegrismic cosmology, and imagery of the Steppe, Menlibayeva’s work attempts to reclaim local culture and find a place for Kazakh traditions and mythology in their modern reality. Her most recent series, on view in the exhibition, combines regional historical sites with women posing as mythological guardians of protection over the sites, dressed in traditional garb, such as in Bodyguards of Yassawi I and II (2025). The scenes are almost futuristic, the women exuding a robotic stillness that transmutes tradition into something uncanny.

ALMA’s inaugural group show, “Qonaqtar,” offers a look at the formative years and major movements of the Kazakh art scene. Qonaqtar means “guests” in Kazakh, and Lāce, who curated the exhibition from the museum’s collection, said that word guided her curatorial thinking.

“It started with me thinking, yes I’m a curator, but I’m also a guest looking at this collection for the first time, and one thing that leapt out at me as recurring was these scenes of celebration, of coming together, of food, and this idea of hospitality,” Lāce told ARTnews. “As a new museum with so many guests visiting not just this institution but also this country for the first time, I thought we too should start with a festive note.”

“Qonaqtar” delves into themes of hospitality, migration, and political tensions in Central Asia over the past century, spanning the Soviet-era, through the Golden Era of Kazakh art between the 1960s-70s, to the recent post-colonial boom. It also touches on the nuances of an art scene finding its footing, responding to multiple social and political stimuli that reshaped the nation.

But Lāce said the exhibition’s aim isn’t just “about hospitality in the nomadic tradition, where people travel far away and strangers give you food or shelter as a way for survival, or how nowadays Kazakh families like a big feast. If you look deeper, this country has had a history of ‘guests,’ of people crossing voluntarily and involuntarily, closely tied to political things happening in the region.”

What was once a mostly nomadic way of life rapidly changed when the Soviets settled in Kazakhstan in the 19th century, seeking to eradicate such traditions, in favor of controlled centers of economic and social production.

During the 1930s, the Kazakh people endured an artificially induced famine caused by the Soviet Union, who took away cattle and grain in an attempt to force locals away from nomadism, resulting in the death of more than a third of the Kazakh population. This drastically changed ideas of hospitality, which is reflected in the art of the time. Toqbolat Togyzbayev’s Still Life with Flatbread (1989), for example, shows a table set for hosting a guest, but only a few rounds of bread and cucumbers are available to be shared.

In the aftermath, the Soviets began displacing other groups, including Koreans and Uyghurs, to Central Asia, Lāce explained, adding “it was a big social engineering project of trying to ‘transform’ societies. All these people come together, even though it is through awful circumstances, but in a way they are all what make Kazakhstan today because they came with their own portable landscapes, their traditions, or even their style of painting. You have to start to question what Kazakh is after a few generations.”

One of the first paintings seen in the exhibition is Shepherd’s Feast (1965) by Aisha Galymbayeva, the first professionally trained female artist in Kazakhstan. Rendered in bright, expressive colors and loose brushworks, Galymbayeva’s pastoral scene is a commentary on how the Soviets would organize festivals related to local culture, like those depicted, offering prizes to shepherds, despite actively working to eradicate nomadism. She created many paintings in this vein, such as Bride (1957) and White Teapot (1990), which show moments of traditional, rural celebrations allowed to be practiced.  

“The Soviet Union was tricky at that time, they didn’t want any kind of political nationalism, but were happy for everyone to have their own national culture at the same time. So some traditions got reinvented and you are allowed to have a little bit of your folklore, but only in a non-political way,” Lāce said.

Salikhitdin Aitbayev’s On the Virgin Lands. Lunchtime (1960s) strikes a similar chord, depicting an event in which the Soviets displaced thousands to make the Kazakh Steppe arable but ended up being futile. “It’s a really a window into this history of this forced migration,” Lāce said.

To complement the artwork on view, Lāce has also tried to add historical context via archival videos, like placing Galymbayeva’s utopic Friendship (1978) in juxtaposition with a film documenting the 1973 Afro-Asian Writers Conference in Almaty. “Writers from both continents were here and in this moment there was a certain kind of decolonial thinking that arose,” she said. Taken together, the artworks and the context is which they were made is what makes the exhibition so worthwhile.

The new museum also holds several specially commissioned outdoor sculptural works by Yinka Shonibare, Alicja Kwade, and Jaume Plensa, placed on the public plazas, inviting people to come to the museum. The second floor features a series of Artist Rooms, currently displaying large-scale works by Anselm Kiefer, an immersive room by Yayoi Kusama, a multi-channel audiovisual installation by Bill Viola, and a maze-like Cor-Ten steel sculpture by Richard Serra.

Beyond what’s on view in the galleries, ALMA will soon begin its robust suite of international programming. Next month, it will host a two-day program of performance and talks, organized with the Hyundai Tate Research Centre. Similarly, ALMA will serve as a site for further research on Kazakh artists. The Getty Foundation and New York University will offer grants to scholars from Central Asia researching art histories, while Paris-based nonprofit AWARE will partner with ALMA to research Kazakh women artists.

“We started with this idea that even if people are not art connoisseurs or not familiar with contemporary art, there would still be something that really speaks to them immediately,” Lāce said. “For Central Asia, it’s a beautiful moment to bring this space to the art scene, because it’s all developing so fast, and we hope that ALMA also offers something new, gives some focus and better the creative economy.”