Almagul Menlibayeva: The Map of Nomadizing Reimagining #3
Kazakhstan/Germany, 2025
4 min
Language: English
Courtesy of the Artist
Posthuman Matter: The Map of Nomadizing Reimaginings #3 by Kazakhstani artist Almagul Menlibayeva comprises several video screens and a postdigital textile piece, and merges feminist craft traditions from Central Asia with post-Soviet histories and AI-induced speculative futures.
The large-scale textile work, hand-woven in Kazakhstan, forms part of a wider series of ‘cyber textiles’ that combine manual labour with neural computation, continuing the tradition of embedding hidden messages within tapestries. The AI-generated image functions as a map, tracing notable sites referenced throughout Menlibayeva’s artistic practice. Each of the videos corresponds to a specific location on the map, ranging from salt lakes to remote steppe villages and former Soviet nuclear test sites. Interweaving documentary video footage captured by the artist with feminist rituals of restoration, nomadic mythology, and fragments from vanishing languages, the AI-generated videos possess a dreamlike quality, evoking lost worlds through technological advancement.
This stream of consciousness is as much a reflection on ecological collapse and geopolitical fracture following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, as it is a radical archive of survival, embodied memory and feminist resistance.
Almagul Menlibayeva, based between Germany and Kazakhstan, works across video, photography, installation, textiles and performance. Her practice engages with environmental degradation, socialist modernism, and socio-political shifts in Central Asia, exploring identity and nation-building through feminist and post-colonial lenses. She employs Eurasian nomadic and indigenous mythologies and AI technologies to create living archives as forms of resistance. Her works have recently been exhibited at HKW, Berlin, DE (2023-2024); Thailand Biennale, Chiang Rai, TH (2023); LACMA, Los Angeles, US (2023); Sharjah Biennial 15, UAE (2023), and GrandPalais, Paris (2016-2017); among others. A major retrospective of her works inaugurates the AMA Almaty Museum of Arts, KAZ in 2025.