Kazakhstan’s Venice Pavilion: An Archive of Silence

On the evening of 5 May, a few hours before the well-heeled guests of the Venice Biennale’s preview were due to sashay through the doors of the Republic of Kazakhstan’s Pavilion, an artwork was quietly dismantled and removed from view. Visitors the following morning, this one included, were none the wiser as they ambled past a black curtain and took in the rest of the exhibition, a strong presentation of works by nine artists that explores the nature of cultural, social and political memory in Central Asia. The exhibition’s title: Qoñyr: The Archive of Silence.

Had the work in question – an installation titled Machine (2013) by Kazakhstani artist Äsel Kadyrkhanova – remained on display, visitors would have seen a striking presentation with an old typewriter as its centrepiece, from which a web of approximately a thousand redacted arrest warrants are ejected through space via red thread. Underscoring the bureaucratic nature of terror, each thread represents a life lost in Kazakhstan under Stalin’s Great Purge of the late 1930s. A few days later, on 9 May, Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev was seen in Moscow as Putin’s special guest at the Victory Day military parade in Red Square.

As for the rationale behind the decision, accounts vary. Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Culture and Information, the pavilion’s commissioner, asserts Machine was removed at the 11th hour for violating its venue agreement with the Museo Storico Navale di Venezia, which prohibits the display of artworks that are political, ideological, propagandistic or discriminatory in nature. The museum’s management company, D’Uva, refutes this claim.

Smail Bayaliyev, Steppe Architectonics, 2026 (installation view, Kazakhstan Pavilion, Venice Biennale) Photo: Luca Girardini. Courtesy of A&A Worldwide

In a response issued to the independent Kazakh media outlet Vlast, D’Uva emphasises that any effort to attribute the decision to the Italian Ministry of Defence-owned museum ‘appears to be completely unfounded and devoid of any factual basis’. The pavilion’s organisers had ‘autonomously decided not to exhibit the artwork within the framework of their own internal coordination process’. While the hire contract does include a ‘standard institutional clause’ stating exhibitions must be compatible with the historical, institutional and public nature of the museum, and respectful of the Italian Navy, neither party had raised any concerns. Furthermore, the company stressed its firm belief ‘that historical reflection and artistic expression must be approached with… intellectual freedom’, and ‘therefore, we consider it inappropriate to use the museum or its institutional structure for speculative purposes to create a media debate that does not correspond to reality’.

Posting on Instagram, Kadyrkhanova confirmed that her work was removed without her permission the night before the opening. At the ministry’s behest, the artist had already revised the work significantly, inserting blank sheets of paper in place of the (already redacted) warrants. A final inspection by a ministry representative concluded that her changes did not go far enough. According to a source close to the matter, other artists in the exhibition were also instructed to make alterations to their work, a claim that has not been verified. At the time of writing, a shot of Kadyrkhanova’s Machine from a previous exhibition is still being used as the lead marketing image for Kazakhstan’s page on the official Biennale website. On 18 May, members of Kazakhstan’s artistic community published an open letter calling for the work to be reinstated, claiming the incident ‘represents a step back to Soviet-era censorship’.

Over a spritz in the Venetian sunshine, unaware of the events that had unfolded the day before, I ask the exhibition’s curator Syrlybek Bekbota if Kazakhstani artists enjoy creative autonomy, citing Freedom House’s score for the country (‘Not free’). “Mostly the artists who self-censor [do so] due to their [own] mentality – conservative individuals, for example,” Bekbota replies via an interpreter. He feels no restrictions imposed on his own artistic practice and attends political protests, he adds.

What of the art that is on view? Directly responding to the Biennale’s theme of In Minor Keys, the Republic’s third presentation in Venice takes a traditional Kazakh composition,Qoñyr (küy) by the twentieth-century composer Äbiken Khasenov (1897–1958), as its conceptual framework. Listed by UNESCO for its ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity’ status, the folk genre of küy has accompanied Kazakhstan through some of its darkest hours. During periods of colonial pressure and political censorship, its complex, rhythmic instrumental compositions have been a vital channel through which communities could openly grieve the loss of their ancestral lands, people and nomadic traditions.

Historically, as the cultural theorist Zira Nauryzbay has noted, küy compositions follow a minor to major modulation scheme – key progressions that denote hope, sublimation and triumph. In marked contrast, compositions dating from the twentieth century – a period that saw Kazakhstan devastated by Soviet rule, mass repression, forced collectivisation and sedentarisation – remain resolutely minor. Bekbota tells me that Khasenov wrote Qoñyr (küy) following the loss of his wife and five children to the manmade famine of 1931–33, also known as Asharshylyk, which saw approximately one-third of the population perish. No one dared mention the Asharshylyk in public during Soviet times, nor was its history taught at schools or universities. The exhibition links this scarred musical score with the ways in which this history continues to colour life today.

Ardak Mukanova, Qoñyr Äulie, Immersion into the Quiet Depths, 2026 (installation view, Kazakhstan Pavilion, Venice Biennale) Photo: Luca Girardini. Courtesy of A&A Worldwide

The Qoñyr of Khasenov’s title most directly translates as the word for ‘brown’, but its wider semantic registers possess a far richer symbolism within Kazakh cosmology. Used to describe a soft sound, the scent of earth, a state of inner concentration or a silence that contains within it all possible sounds, qoñyr also belongs to the maternal principle, a womblike, all-encompassing primordial space. Its texture is velvet.

When asked in what key he would place today’s Kazakhstan, Bekbota replies “definitely major”. That being said, Qoñyr: The Archive of Silence, is undoubtedly an exhibition solemn in tone. Unfolding across the five-storey Museo Storico Navale, the sensorial journey begins in the grand internal courtyard with Steppe Architectonics, an imposing sculptural installation by Smail Bayaliyev. Composed in a traditional Central Asian wool and felt material, the work resembles a grouping of horse heads. Like the animal, the work’s presence is mysterious, all-knowing and at ease within the vastness of the space, which could so easily swallow other sculptural interventions whole.

The regality is further elevated by Dübir (2026), a sonic installation by ADYR-ASPAN (Gulmaral Tattibayeva and Natalya Ligay) and Akmaral Mergen, which layers ambient sounds of the steppe with meditative, hooflike rhythms. The work takes its title from a word that refers to a low-frequency rumble characteristic of the steppe – the reverberation of nomadic horsemen approaching, who are felt through the earth before they are heard by the ear. It’s a compelling introduction: in Kazakh culture, my guide tells me, the horse is less a symbol of nomadic culture than it is a worldview – a measure of space, the rhythm of a journey, the vigour of imagination.

The rest of the exhibition continues as a warren of interconnected presentations, ascending to the fifth floor. With its sombre lighting and fabric partitions, its dark walls and low ceilings, it is almost as if we have climbed inside the horse. It is not unpleasant – intimate and cocoonlike in fact. Very Qoñyr indeed.

Shown here is one of the exhibition’s strongest works: Mansur Smagambetov’s video installation The Audibility of Childhood, the artist’s reflection on growing up near Semipalatinsk, the Soviet Union’s largest nuclear weapon testing complex. Academic sources estimate that the cumulative yield of tests conducted there between 1949 and 1963 exceeded 37.5 megatons – more than 2,500 times the 15-kiloton Hiroshima bomb. The environmental devastation it wreaked and the legacy of cancers, birth defects and intergenerational trauma it bequeathed endures today.

Mansur Smagambetov at Kazakhstan Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2026. Photo:Luca Girardini. Courtesy A&A Worldwide

Smagambetov’s was a childhood punctuated by the sounds of shattering glass. Between snippets of Soviet-era broadcasts, the artist recalls the unwitting pride he felt seeing his hometown reported on the television each time a test shook the steppe. This jumbled excitement of feeling seen and represented, even when it’s for all the wrong reasons, is perhaps one that the artists representing the US, Israel and Russia at this year’s Venice can relate to.

On a neighbouring wall hangs Kitchen Recipes, a series of enticing photo-collages by the Almaty-based artist Nurbol Nurakhmet. Juxtaposing images of nuclear mushroom clouds with domestic foodstuffs, the images are seductive in their colour, texture and form. It is another compelling example of how the private pursuits of beauty and pleasure can be contained within the daily realities of collective oppression, a state of living that becomes another shade of ordinary.

Throughout the exhibition, sound and silence act as contrapuntal guides through diaphanous layers of personal and collective memory, repression and loss. Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Culture and Information describes its moment on the Venetian stage as ‘an invitation to listen to quieter voices… particularly in a time of global instability’. For all the success of Qoñyr: The Archive of Silence’s curatorial proposition, its celebration of halftones and whispers held beneath the breath, it’s regrettable that some voices are not heard from behind the curtain.