Almagul Menlibayeva (born 1969 in Almaty, Kazakhstan) is an award-winning contemporary artist who works mostly in multi-channel video, photography and mixed media installation. She lives and works in Germany and Kazakhstan.
Her work has been featured internationally at the Sydney Biennale, Australia; the Venice Biennale; the Moscow Biennale, Russia; the Gangwon International Biennale, South Korea. Her recent solo exhibitions include Green, Yellow, Red, and Green again, TSE gallery, Astana, Kazakhstan (2018); Transformation, Grand Palais, Paris, France (2016-2017); My Silk Road to You, Lexing Art, Miami, USA (2016); Union of the Fire and Water, curator Suad Garaeva, 56th Venice Biennial, Venice, Italy (2015); Transoxiana Dreams, Videozone, Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany (2014); Empire of the Memory, Ethnographic Museum, Warsaw, Poland (2013); An Odd for the Wastelands and Gulags, Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria (2013). EXPO 1 Exploration of ecological challenges, MoMA PS1, New York, USA.
Her video installations and photography have been exhibited widely at venues such as Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium; Queens Museum, NY, USA; Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Ithaca, NY, USA; Stenersen Museum, Oslo, Norway; ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, Germany; University of California, San Diego, CA, USA; Center of Contemporary Art, Zamok Ujazdowski, Warsaw, Poland; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland; Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, Mexico; Kulturzentrum bei den Minoriten, Graz, Austria; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia.
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. A winner of the Main Prize of Munich's Kino der Kunst International Film Festival (2013), Menlibayeva was awarded the French Ministry of Culture's Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2017.