FRIEZE ABU DHABI 2026

Almagul Menlibayeva (b. 1969, Almaty)is a contemporary artist who works mostly in multi-channel video, photography and mixed media installation. Menlibayeva’s work addresses issues such as critical explorations of Soviet modernity; social, economic; and political transformations in post-Soviet Central Asia; and decolonial reimaginings of gender, environmental degradation, and Eurasian nomadic and indigenous cosmologies and mythologies. She lives and works in Germany and Kazakhstan.

Her work has been shown at the Venice Biennale (2005, 2009, 2015, 2026), the Biennale of Sydney, the Sharjah, Gwangju and Moscow Biennials and the Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, as well as at MoMA PS1, LACMA, the Stedelijk Museum, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, ZKM, Kiasma and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Major solo exhibitions include I Understand Everything, a retrospective at the Almaty Museum of Arts (2025–26); My Silk Road to You and Nomadized Suprematism at the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto (2024); Transformation at the Grand Palais, Paris (2016–17); Union of Fire and Water at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015); and exhibitions at the Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Kunstraum Innsbruck and M HKA, Antwerp.

She was named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2017) and received the Main Prize at Kino der Kunst, Munich (2013). Her work is held in the collections of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the Stedelijk Museum, M HKA, Queensland Art Gallery | GOMA, the Sharjah Art Foundation, the Almaty Museum of Arts, the Salsali Private Museum and the MOMENTUM Collection.

At booth G07 in the Global Futures section of the inaugural Frieze Abu Dhabi, Menlibayeva’s paintings of the 1990s are shown alongside cyber textiles from the series whose works have entered the collection of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, and photographs from the Caspian Palms series. Four decades of work in one space: from the night canvases of late-Soviet Almaty to works in which new technologies become a continuation of the ancient art of felt-making.