Kazakhstan’s Almaty Museum Celebrates Central Asian Art

There are elements of the international museum-familiar: Richard Serra’s Junction, Yayoi Kusama’s Love is Calling, and a curved frozen lagoon piece of Anselm Kiefer’s. But the overwhelming attraction here is the Kazakh and other central Asian art, most of which hasn’t done nearly enough museum and Biennale globetrotting. There is a superb retrospective on Almagul Menlibayeva, who has some international visibility, but there are many other works on display by artists who deserve the same recognition. Almaty fills a gap in the post-Soviet art collecting landscape. The museum’s principal arts collection, the Abilkhan Kasteev State Museum of Arts, features the most important Soviet-era artists but its priorities tend to reflect an official line. Socialist Realism is also well-represented, but emigre and dissident artists are not.

The museum is part of a new cultural cluster, across a park from a forthcoming Ballet theater. This area is located south of the city center, where Almaty’s orderly grid turns to an automobile-oriented sequence of towers and malls (the largest of which, the Essentai, is an SOM project—a sure sign that international capitalism is well-established).

The site is vertiginous; foothills to the adjoining mountains arguably start right there, and the architects largely left them, with the site serving, as design lead Chris Lanksbury explains, “like a plinth to the building,” with two main entrances located to the west and east sides. 

The form of the museum is tectonic, consisting of rough L-shaped volumes clad in Jura limestone and aluminum panels. Their conceptual narrative, Lansksbury explains, was “metal reflecting the city and stone mimicking the mountains.” The limestone frontage is less fenestrated, for good reason, as Lanksbury notes, “the massiveness of the stone was quite important.”

The architects wanted to avoid a “massive box” and instead produced “a sculptural exercise based on a functional base.” They twisted its form in a number of ways—and then still more due the decision to place Serra’s 75 feet-long Junction inside. They had to tweak plans to fit it but this worked out felicitously. He says, “It improved the form of the building by creating further cranking of the facade,” It also enabled another double height space within the museum, providing Serra vantages you don’t always get. 

The material binary continues inside, with aluminum and limestone volumes that each border one side of the museum’s main hallway. It’s a nod to Kazakhstan’s wondrous Charyn Canyon about 120 miles away.