Gulnur Mukazhanova desires the felt to vanish. “On a technical stage,” the artist tells me. “Till your eyes not have to work. Your coronary heart does.” We spoke shortly after the opening of “Dowry of the Soul,” her first main institutional survey, curated by Wang Weiwei, which brings collectively a couple of hundred works unfolding throughout a number of flooring of the previous thread-spinning manufacturing unit turned museum.
I first heard Mukazhanova’s title by phrase of mouth, late one evening, over smoky tea, on the kitchen desk of the artwork historian Indira Dyussebayeva-Ziyabek. Low voices, low mild. There have been uncooked waters beneath every part that winter. Almaty, Ziyabek’s hometown, was reeling from lethal protests. Our sentences felt pinned in place, softened by occasional laughter. She spoke of her analysis on reminiscence and artists’ practices following the collapse of the usS.R., how the yurt and different nomadic dwellings have been to develop into a metaphorical membrane to safeguard wealthy histories and traditions erased in the course of the Soviet period. It was right here that she talked about the Kazakh artist Gulnur Mukazhanova.
Of late, Mukazhanova has gained worldwide prominence, turning textiles—particularly Kazakh felt—right into a philosophy on existence, rupture, morality and heritage. Her current works usually function at an architectural scale: a felt fee that snaked throughout Venice for La Biennale Basis, a façade anchoring the inaugural Bukhara Biennial and, most lately, a tower of felt on the Tselinny Middle for Up to date Tradition in Almaty.
At CHAT, the exhibition opens within the huge entrance corridor, the place suspended sculptures composed of 1000’s of colourful cloth scraps float at various altitudes in island-like formations. Sourced from outdated Kazakh marriage ceremony textiles and Hong Kong markets, the brocade cuttings in False Hope or Second or The Current (2018-2025) are held along with dressmaker pins fairly than sewn or glued. The pins are tiny, almost ornamental, but maintain the large set up collectively by way of innumerable small wounds. Sharp consideration to element, and in flip to metaphor and labor, run all through Mukazhanova’s follow.
“A lot of Mukazhanova’s work responds to the stress between the quickly globalized world and conventional methods of life,” Wang notes, describing how the artist makes use of the dowry as a metaphor that comprises each hope and dislocation.
Upstairs, alongside the principle ground of the museum, the hallway is lined with tuskiiz carpets, conventional Kazakh wall hangings from the artist’s private assortment. In pre-Soviet Kazakhstan, the place nomadic life knowledgeable home area, tuskiiz have been hung in particular locations contained in the yurt to honor a household’s lineage and to guard them from evil spirits. Such felted objects, which carry reminiscence and ritual, are a part of how a soul could transition to the ancestral realm.
By hand, matting and rolling and coaxing, Mukazhanova has gone on to create modern responses to tuskiiz that push felt into summary painterly worlds. The three giant-sized canvases of Submit-Nomadic Realities, Untitled (2025), overlooking the CHAT advanced, are dramatic in each scale and composition. They maintain the portal-like arch of a tuskiiz, whilst fuchsia materials melts and drags in locations like icing throughout a cake earlier than it’s cooled.
The sheer growth of the felt medium into unrecognizable territory is a delight of the present. A darkish, winding gallery options 84 double-sided felt canvases from Mukazhanova’s Portrait Reflections (on the historical past of my homeland, Qandy Qantar 2022) (2022-) sequence organized off the wall in a labyrinth. The summary ghostly portraits, made intuitive by way of her layering and brushing of the fibers, are a freedom.
“The course of the fibers,” writes Mukazhanova, “follows my bodily motion, leaving seen traces of gesture and energy. The felting course of is sluggish and bodily demanding, and for me it has develop into a ritual of endurance, launch and focus.”
Tendrils of colour type deltas, shedding throughout the work. One yellow portrait has nearly a moth-eaten high quality, a gaping gap at its heart revealing magenta and darkish purple fibers beneath. Elsewhere, there are hints of the white serpent, a legendary creature in Kazakh nomadic tradition symbolizing the brink between the dwelling and the spirit world.
Recognized to resist the weather, fireplace as a lot as water, the felt takes within the sound too. The portraits are heavy with low voices within the gallery and an unbridled, six-channel soundscape by the Kazakh musician SAMRATTAMA, filled with wind, the open steppe and Tengrist chants. As Ziyabek has written, Mukazhanova’s felted works develop into “not solely a bridge to ancestors, but in addition a supply of therapeutic.” Mukazhanova will end this ongoing sequence when she reaches 262 portraits, one for every life misplaced throughout Almaty’s Qandy Qantar, often known as Bloody January, the place protesters in opposition to rising oil costs have been killed by safety forces in 2022.
Round that point, Mukazhanova’s sculptures additionally returned to the figurative: felt casts of her personal physique. The artist had suffered an amazing private loss, the passing of her uncle in the course of the pandemic. “Time loses definition when you consider the souls of your ancestors,” she instructed me. “The reminiscence is heavy with my uncle’s dying alongside Qandy Qantar, alongside the [Soviet-era Asharshylyk] famine,” the place a 3rd of the Kazakh inhabitants perished between 1930 and 1933. Demise is a dislocation that withstands chronology. The ache and the reminiscences pool, one droplet folds into the following, with out realizing the place one ends and the opposite begins.
In the course of a smaller gallery at CHAT, Mukazhanova recreated her set up from Öliara: The Darkish Moon (2022), a figurative burial web site of soil and silk. The white gauzy silk, wrapping across the web site like a serpent, feels alive regardless of any matter-of-factness. Its transparency giving technique to shards of vibrant textile, nostalgia, filth and reckoning: “from mud you might be and mud you shall return.”
The felt skins of the artist’s physique, Untitled (2023), relaxation on the encompassing partitions. Of their making, Mukazhanova’s hand arches in a wave, as if conducting, drawing wool and outdated knowledge right into a widow’s peak, then out flat.
“Dowry of the Soul” is on view at CHAT by way of March 1, 2026.
Extra exhibition opinions
