A groundbreaking cultural milestone has been achieved in Kazakhstan with the opening of the Almaty Museum of Arts, the country's first privately funded modern art museum. Entrepreneur and passionate art collector Nurlan Smagulov invested $120 million to create this ambitious project in Kazakhstan's former capital, filling a significant gap in the Central Asian nation's cultural landscape.
The museum represents a remarkable achievement for a country where contemporary art remains relatively scarce. Experts estimate that only about 40 contemporary artists work in Almaty, roughly half the number found in a single artist building like the Gerichtshöfe in Berlin's Wedding district. Despite this limited artistic community, Kazakhstan's wealth from natural resources has enabled this ambitious cultural venture to flourish.
The museum's impressive statistics reveal the scope of Smagulov's vision: 10,000 square meters of exhibition space housing more than 700 works from his collection. The collection focuses not only on Kazakh art but encompasses the broader Central Asian region, including works from China and Kyrgyzstan, reflecting Almaty's strategic location near these cultural crossroads.
Almaty's urban layout follows a grid pattern similar to ancient Chinese cities, with upscale neighborhoods located in the higher elevations toward the south, where mighty peaks rise dramatically behind the city. The museum sits strategically along one of these mountain-parallel avenues, where vertical boulevards leading down into the valley intersect with horizontal roads running along the mountain's base.
The museum's architecture, designed by London-based Chapman Taylor, mirrors this intersection concept. The deconstructivist building features two traverses clad in German limestone, aluminum, and Corten steel, connected by a canyon-like, glass-domed central passage. This design creates visual references to Kazakhstan's rugged landscapes through deep, asymmetrical window cuts that resemble natural canyons.
Visitors approaching from any direction are immediately drawn to the 12-meter-tall sculpture "Nades" by renowned artist Jaume Plensa. The Barcelona-born sculptor, who recently enchanted Salzburg Festival audiences with his "Secret Garden" sculpture forest, has created another masterpiece that resonates deeply with local culture. The marble-white girl with abstracted facial features and two traditionally braided pigtails has been quickly embraced by locals, who recognize the hairstyle as distinctly Kazakh.
Another striking outdoor installation, Yinka Shonibare's "Wind Sculpture" made of fluttering fabrics, greets visitors at the main entrance. The British-Nigerian artist's colorful work, featuring a vibrant mix of patterns, has been readily accepted by locals. This acceptance is particularly meaningful given that Shonibare's art frequently explores colonial exchange processes between Asia and Africa, including the adoption of Dutch-Indonesian cotton fabrics in Nigeria, where they're now considered indigenous textiles.
The museum's interior layout successfully balances international and local artistic voices. Equal floor space is dedicated to both world-renowned international artists and major figures in Kazakh art. The right wing features a large exhibition hall on the ground floor, an event space above, and a gallery with four halls, each dedicated to exceptional contemporary international artists.
The warm beige limestone walls are framed with rust-red Corten steel at entrances and passages, creating not only appealing color contrasts but also reflecting the natural color palette of Kazakh steppes with their oxidized reddish rocks and sand-colored dunes. These landscape references continue throughout the building's asymmetrical, deconstructivist design elements.
One of the museum's crown jewels is Richard Serra's "Junction," the last work the master personally arranged before his death. Four house-sized, spherically curved Corten steel wings bend into the space to form a giant's crossroads when viewed from above. The 155-ton steel installation demonstrates Serra's signature ability to make massive materials appear elegantly poetic and weightless, commanding awe from visitors regardless of their previous exposure to his work.
The piece resonates particularly well in Kazakhstan, not only because it naturally incorporates the country's desert colors but also because it reflects the nation's role as a cultural crossroads along the Silk Road. Serra's monumental spatial signs echo the equally impressive Buddhist petroglyphs at Tamgaly Tas, a UNESCO World Heritage site just 120 kilometers from Almaty, where Buddhist traders and missionaries carved symbols into the picturesque rock landscape along the Ili River centuries ago.
Bill Viola's six-part video installation "Stations" continues to move audiences to tears with its masterful exploration of life's six stages from birth to death. The films are reflected in six granite plates positioned before tall rectangular projections that evoke both dark lakes of knowledge and grave markers. Viola's signature underwater imagery, inspired by his childhood near-drowning experience and subsequent near-death encounter, depicts human figures plunging headfirst into water, drowning, and being reborn—themes that resonate with ancient Kazakh Tengri beliefs and Sufism.
Unlike his usual Renaissance inspirations, Viola drew from Francisco de Zurbarán's baroque intensity for this work, specifically the 1629 painting "The Apparition of Saint Peter to Saint Peter Nolasco," with its pitch-black background and upside-down crucified figure serving as the blueprint for Viola's visual philosophizing about death and afterlife.
Anselm Kiefer's massive installation "Questi scritti, quando verranno bruciati, daranno finalmente un po di luce" (These writings, when burned, will finally give a little light) holds special relevance for Almaty. Just as Kiefer palimpsestically allows hope to sprout from the ashes of burned books, Kazakhs rebuilt structures destroyed during the 2022 Qantar uprising—known as "Bloody January"—without forgetting the painful lessons learned.
Even Yayoi Kusama's mirror cabinet "Love is Calling" from 2013, now ubiquitous in major museums worldwide, finds particular resonance with Kazakh audiences. The playfully colorful, polka-dotted forms apparently touch something deep in this land where Stalin resettled numerous North Koreans during World War II and where many Chinese residents now live.
While these four international artist cabinets are undeniably impressive, visitors don't travel to Kazakhstan solely to see works they could view at the Guggenheim Bilbao—clearly a major inspiration for Smagulov in both architecture and collection philosophy. The truly unique attraction lies in the museum's permanent exhibition of Kazakh art, housed in the large ground-floor hall of the right wing.
Curated by Latvian expert Inga Lāce, this exhibition offers an overview of art in Kazakhstan from the late 1920s to today, viewed through the lens of someone socialized in late socialism in the Baltic region. Lāce's semi-outsider perspective—former Eastern Bloc but not entangled in internal Kazakh affairs—proves refreshingly insightful. Her exhibition distills the essence of Kazakh art through just four thematic chapters, highlighting outstanding artistic personalities and their respective influences and groups.
Many of the artworks appear as echoes of inner losses caused by external catastrophes. Particularly poignant is the sense of loss regarding nomadic lifestyle traditions—the yurt as a built representation of the Tengri cosmos appears repeatedly with melancholic longing—and the destruction of musical and poetic traditions through Lenin's and Stalin's forced collectivization. The exhibition also addresses concrete environmental disasters: the shrinking of the Aral Sea due to collective farm cotton irrigation, land contamination from aggressive mining of vast uranium deposits, and pollution around the Baikonur space center.
These themes are captured in colorfully a-perspectival compositions that fascinate through their unique blend of Persian miniature painting, Western modernism—including the muralism of Diego Rivera, who visited Moscow in 1927—and indigenous traditions. Even Kazakh constructivists of the 1920s differed significantly from their Russian colleagues in their use of color, favoring bright hues over the typical red, black, and white triad, as seen in Alexander Nikolaevich Volkov's "Rhythmical Composition" from 1920, which bursts with sun-yellow and resembles Macke more than Russian constructivism.
Under the title "Qonaqtar," the curator unites images themed around gathering and guests. Serenjab Baldano's untitled and distorted crumpled faces from his 1991 series "Me and My Masks" directly reference the importance of music and dance, embodied through Kazakh-Chinese masks. One life-sized sculpture is constructed entirely from musical instruments like the dombra, a traditional bowl-necked lute. However, references to times of great hunger also emerge subconsciously throughout the exhibition.
Even in Qisamedin Maktum's "Jute (Hunger)" from 1973, featuring a starved camel, indirect allusions are made to the terrible famine of the early 1930s that, like Stalin's Holodomor in Ukraine, cost nearly half of Kazakhstan's population their lives. Yet the exhibition also reveals the brighter side of food's existential significance through the fundamental Kazakh principle of unconditional hospitality—the survival-essential dostyk in harsh desert environments—condensed in numerous paintings of shared meals.
Interestingly, many of these hospitality scenes, such as Aisha Galymbayeva's "Shepherds Feast" from 1965 or Salikhitdin Aitbayev's "On Virgin Soil. Lunchtime," also from the 1960s, are compositionally structured like Leonardo's Last Supper, creating fascinating cultural cross-references.
These core themes of Kazakh art are remarkably reflected in the work of perhaps its most important representative, Almagul Menlibayeva. The artist, known in Europe through her years of residence in Berlin, is featured in a special exhibition in the museum's opposite wing, showcasing more than 100 works spanning from the 1980s to today. Since the 1990s, the same-aged Smagulov has been collecting her paintings and following her career.
Before the museum's opening, it was touching to witness both the billionaire Kazakh Medici and the artist—who in the 1980s painted on everything from old cardboard to plastic film due to poverty and lack of canvas—walking together through the chronologically arranged gallery of her life's work, using the paintings to reassure themselves about their shared past struggles.
Menlibayeva's work fearlessly tackles controversial subjects from "Stalin's Silk Road" project to political corruption and sex—topics rather taboo in the nominally Islamic state. In one video, she runs through Almaty in a white wedding dress as an abandoned bride, soon facing harsh verbal abuse from passersby. Like in her "Little Gods from My Mother's Dress" from 1995, her work repeatedly explores fundamental materials that can both protect and betray.
The country's deadly cotton industry returns in her most impressive film, "Transoxiana Dreams." The Aral Sea, soon to be dried out because of the "white gold," with its armada of fishing boats rusting away on dry land, becomes a surreally Tarkovskian backdrop for Kazakh women clothed only in fox furs and military caps, allegorically dancing the country's historical vicissitudes in black and white.
These hybrid forms combining Western elements like performance and film noir with distinctly Kazakh characteristics make the journey to Almaty and this doubly unique new museum truly worthwhile. The Almaty Museum of Arts represents not just a cultural achievement but a bridge between global artistic traditions and Central Asian heritage, offering visitors insights into a region's artistic soul that cannot be found elsewhere in the world.
