Water is not a landscape here - it is a site of control.
Kazakh artist Almagul Menlibayeva invites viewers into a contemporary, technological, and philosophical world where water, myth, and the feminine intersect across Central Asia - from the Caspian Sea to the steppes of Kazakhstan - in landscapes shaped by geopolitical pressures, ecological crisis, and digital surveillance. Almagul Menlibayeva offers the instruments to reconstruct the world that is descending into the challenging dialogue with the New Global Order.
Through video, AI-driven cyber textiles, photography, and immersive sound, Menlibayeva constructs a contested cosmos, a self-governing universe where ancient mythologies - ancestral spirits, peri, chimeras, and goddesses - act as technologies of survival, memory, and resistance in the contemporary world. Here, the women of the Pyatigorsk islands, Cyber Queens in anti-surveillance costumes, and the goddess Umay navigate history, ecology, and geopolitics through imagination and digital media.
Highlights include the two-channel video Ride the Caspian (produced in collaboration with Iranian-American artist Bahar Behbahani), the cyber-textile installation Mother Water Gulbibi Balkhash, and the photographic series Forever Umai, each tracing entanglements of personal history, myth, ecological crisis, and political power.
In this universe, geography itself is alive, with lakes, rivers, deserts, and steppes acting as agents of memory and transformation. Visitors are invited to enter this alternative cosmos, where myth, technology, and female agency intertwine, and where history is remembered, resisted, and rewritten.
- Dr. Diana T. Kudaibergen, Curator
