{"id":20295,"date":"2026-01-16T17:46:43","date_gmt":"2026-01-16T17:46:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2026\/01\/16\/exhibition-review-gulnur-mukazhanovas-dowry-of-the-soul-at-chat\/"},"modified":"2026-01-16T17:46:49","modified_gmt":"2026-01-16T17:46:49","slug":"exhibition-review-gulnur-mukazhanovas-dowry-of-the-soul-at-chat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2026\/01\/16\/exhibition-review-gulnur-mukazhanovas-dowry-of-the-soul-at-chat\/","title":{"rendered":"Exhibition Review: Gulnur Mukazhanova\u2019s \u201cDowry of the Soul\u201d at CHAT"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Gulnur Mukazhanova, False Hope or Moment of the Present<\/em>, 2018. Photo: Visual Voices, Image courtesy: CHAT (Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile), Hong Kong<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Gulnur Mukazhanova<\/a> wants the felt to disappear. \u201cOn a technical level,\u201d the artist tells me. \u201cUntil your eyes no longer need to work. Your heart does.\u201d We spoke shortly after the opening of \u201cDowry of the Soul,\u201d her first major institutional survey, curated by Wang Weiwei<\/a>, which brings together more than one hundred works unfolding across multiple floors of the former thread-spinning factory turned museum.<\/p>\n

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I first heard Mukazhanova\u2019s name by word of mouth, late one night, over smoky tea, at the kitchen table of the art historian Indira Dyussebayeva-Ziyabek<\/a>. Low voices, low light. There were raw waters beneath everything that winter. Almaty, Ziyabek\u2019s hometown, was reeling from deadly protests. Our sentences felt pinned in place, softened by occasional laughter. She spoke of her research on memory and artists\u2019 practices following the collapse of the U.S.S.R., how the yurt and other nomadic dwellings were to become a metaphorical membrane to safeguard rich histories and traditions erased during the Soviet era. It was here that she mentioned the Kazakh artist Gulnur Mukazhanova.<\/p>\n

Of late, Mukazhanova has gained international prominence, turning textiles\u2014especially Kazakh felt\u2014into a philosophy on existence, rupture, morality and heritage. Her recent works often operate at an architectural scale: a felt commission that snaked across Venice for La Biennale Foundation, a fa\u00e7ade anchoring the inaugural Bukhara Biennial and, most recently, a tower of felt at the Tselinny Center for Contemporary Culture in Almaty.<\/p>\n

At CHAT, the exhibition opens in the vast entrance hall, where suspended sculptures composed of thousands of colorful fabric scraps float at varying altitudes in island-like formations. Sourced from old Kazakh wedding textiles and Hong Kong markets, the brocade cuttings in False Hope or Moment or The Present<\/i> (2018-2025) are held together with dressmaker pins rather than sewn or glued. The pins are tiny, nearly decorative, yet hold the enormous installation together through innumerable small wounds. Sharp attention to detail, and in turn to metaphor and labor, run throughout Mukazhanova\u2019s practice.<\/p>\n

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Gulnur Mukazhanova. Photo: Chris Lusher<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cMuch of Mukazhanova\u2019s work responds to the tension between the rapidly globalized world and traditional ways of life,\u201d Wang notes, describing how the artist uses the dowry as a metaphor that contains both hope and dislocation.<\/p>\n

Upstairs, along the main floor of the museum, the hallway is lined with tuskiiz carpets, traditional Kazakh wall hangings from the artist\u2019s personal collection. In pre-Soviet Kazakhstan, where nomadic life informed domestic space, tuskiiz were hung in special places inside the yurt to honor a family\u2019s lineage and to protect them from evil spirits. Such felted objects, which carry memory and ritual, are part of how a soul may transition to the ancestral realm.<\/p>\n

By hand, matting and rolling and coaxing, Mukazhanova has gone on to create contemporary responses to tuskiiz that push felt into abstract painterly worlds. The three giant-sized canvases of Post-Nomadic Realities, Untitled<\/i> (2025), overlooking the CHAT complex, are dramatic in both scale and composition. They retain the portal-like arch of a tuskiiz, even as fuchsia material melts and drags in places like icing across a cake before it\u2019s cooled.<\/p>\n

The sheer expansion of the felt medium into unrecognizable territory is a delight of the show. A dark, winding gallery features 84 double-sided felt canvases from Mukazhanova\u2019s Portrait Reflections (on the history of my homeland, Qandy Qantar 2022)<\/i> (2022-) series arranged off the wall in a labyrinth. The abstract ghostly portraits, made intuitive through her layering and brushing of the fibers, are a freedom.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe direction of the fibers,\u201d writes Mukazhanova, \u201cfollows my bodily movement, leaving visible traces of gesture and effort. The felting process is slow and physically demanding, and for me it has become a ritual of endurance, release and concentration.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Gulnur Mukazhanova, Bosa\u011fa\u201d 1 (Threshold 1)<\/em>, 2024 (detail). Image courtesy: Gulnur Mukazhanova<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Tendrils of color form deltas, shedding across the work. One yellow portrait has almost a moth-eaten quality, a gaping hole at its center revealing magenta and dark purple fibers beneath. Elsewhere, there are hints of the white serpent, a mythical creature in Kazakh nomadic culture symbolizing the threshold between the living and the spirit world.<\/p>\n

Known to withstand the elements, fire as much as water<\/keyword>, the felt takes in the sound too. The portraits are heavy with low voices in the gallery and an unbridled, six-channel soundscape by the Kazakh musician SAMRATTAMA, full of wind, the open steppe and Tengrist chants. As Ziyabek has written, Mukazhanova\u2019s felted works become \u201cnot only a bridge to ancestors, but also a source of healing.\u201d Mukazhanova will finish this ongoing series when she reaches 262 portraits, one for each life lost during Almaty\u2019s Qandy Qantar, also known as Bloody January, where protesters against rising oil prices were killed by security forces in 2022.<\/p>\n

Around that time, Mukazhanova\u2019s sculptures also returned to the figurative: felt casts of her own body. The artist had suffered a great personal loss, the passing of her uncle during the pandemic. \u201cTime loses definition when you think about the souls of your ancestors,\u201d she told me. \u201cThe memory is heavy with my uncle\u2019s death alongside Qandy Qantar, alongside the [Soviet-era Asharshylyk] famine,\u201d where a third of the Kazakh population perished between 1930 and 1933. Death is a dislocation that withstands chronology. The pain and the memories pool, one droplet folds into the next, without knowing where one ends and the other begins.<\/p>\n

In the middle of a smaller gallery at CHAT, Mukazhanova recreated her installation from \u00d6liara: The Dark Moon<\/i> (2022), a figurative burial site of soil and silk. The white gauzy silk, wrapping around the site like a serpent, feels alive despite any matter-of-factness. Its transparency giving way to shards of vibrant textile, nostalgia, dirt and reckoning: \u201cfrom dust you are and dust you shall return.\u201d<\/p>\n

The felt skins of the artist\u2019s body, Untitled<\/i> (2023), rest on the surrounding walls. In their making, Mukazhanova\u2019s hand arches in a wave, as if conducting, drawing wool and old wisdom into a widow\u2019s peak, then out flat.<\/p>\n

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Gulnur Mukazhanova, Post-Nomadic Reality \u2013 Untitled<\/em>, 2025. Image courtesy: CHAT (Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile), Hong Kong<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cDowry of the Soul<\/b><\/a>\u201d is on view at CHAT through March 1, 2026.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

More exhibition reviews<\/b><\/h3>\n

\t\t\t\t\"Gulnur<\/p><\/div>\n