ALMATY – We often believe we understand a culture through its symbols. But can traditions truly be known without living them? Seeking answers beyond archives and history books, Kazakh artist Radina Yassuyeva spent a year living in a yurt on the steppe, experiencing the rhythms, hardships and routines of nomadic life firsthand.
Her experience became the basis for “AQ YOURT,” a new solo exhibition at Esentai Gallery in Almaty that explores what remains of Kazakhstan’s nomadic heritage once images and myths replace living traditions. Kazakh Pharmacy references English artist Damien Hirst’s famous installation Pharmacy while translating it into a distinctly Kazakh context.
Photo credit: Ayana Birbayeva/The Astana Times Curated by Togzhan Sakbayeva, the exhibition argues that contemporary Kazakhstan often experiences its nomadic heritage through recognizable images – ornaments, felt carpets, yurts and steppe landscapes – rather than through everyday practice.
Rather than celebrating tradition nostalgically, the exhibition asks a more uncomfortable question: what knowledge disappears when a way of life can no longer be lived, only represented? For Yassuyeva, the project is deeply personal. Experiencing all four seasons in the steppe under conditions close to traditional nomadic life, she confronted both its beauty and its realities such as relentless physical labor, dependence on weather and livestock, and the dense web of relationships that sustained steppe communities.
The experience became the foundation for the exhibition, transforming the gallery itself into a symbolic yurt where contemporary artworks explore memory, identity and the fragile continuity of cultural knowledge. The exhibition unfolds as a single immersive environment rather than a sequence of individual works.
Like entering a traditional yurt, visitors step into one shared space where domestic life, family history and spiritual memory coexist. Images of the artist’s relatives become a metaphor for memory-fragmentary, incomplete, and requiring effort to be deciphered.
Photo credit: Ayana Birbayeva/The Astana Times The installation is divided into two symbolic zones – one dedicated to ancestors (aruakhs) amid fields of tulips, the other surrounded by roses. At the heart of the exhibition is the video installation. Its central object is a syrmak – a traditional felt carpet that once formed part of the artist’s dowry.
The center of its tulip ornament has been cut away and replaced with a blank white canvas, symbolizing the rupture in family and cultural memory created by the disappearance of the nomadic way of life. Surrounding the projection is Mazhilis, an installation portraying family members, guests and ancestors as tulip-shaped faces arranged across a plastic carpet against a backdrop resembling a modern kerege, the lattice structure of a yurt.
Once dismissing extended family gatherings as little more than social obligation, Yassuyeva came to understand them during her time on the pasture as an essential mechanism through which knowledge, memory and identity pass between generations. Reclaiming women’s place in steppe history