Gulnur Mukazhanova’s Felt-Making as Philosophy

Gulnur Mukazhanova wants the felt to disappear. “On a technical level,” the artist tells me. “Until your eyes no longer need to work. Your heart does.” We spoke shortly after the opening of “Dowry of the Soul,” her first major institutional survey, curated by Wang Weiwei, which brings together more than one hundred works unfolding across multiple floors of the former thread-spinning factory turned museum.

I first heard Mukazhanova’s name by word of mouth, late one night, over smoky tea, at the kitchen table of the art historian Indira Dyussebayeva-Ziyabek. Low voices, low light. There were raw waters beneath everything that winter. Almaty, Ziyabek’s hometown, was reeling from deadly protests. Our sentences felt pinned in place, softened by occasional laughter. She spoke of her research on memory and artists’ practices following the collapse of the U.S.S.R., how the yurt and other nomadic dwellings were to become a metaphorical membrane to safeguard rich histories and traditions erased during the Soviet era. It was here that she mentioned the Kazakh artist Gulnur Mukazhanova.

Of late, Mukazhanova has gained international prominence, turning textiles—especially Kazakh felt—into a philosophy on existence, rupture, morality and heritage. Her recent works often operate at an architectural scale: a felt commission that snaked across Venice for La Biennale Foundation, a façade anchoring the inaugural Bukhara Biennial and, most recently, a tower of felt at the Tselinny Center for Contemporary Culture in Almaty.

At CHAT, the exhibition opens in the vast entrance hall, where suspended sculptures composed of thousands of colorful fabric scraps float at varying altitudes in island-like formations. Sourced from old Kazakh wedding textiles and Hong Kong markets, the brocade cuttings in False Hope or Moment or The Present (2018-2025) are held together with dressmaker pins rather than sewn or glued. The pins are tiny, nearly decorative, yet hold the enormous installation together through innumerable small wounds. Sharp attention to detail, and in turn to metaphor and labor, run throughout Mukazhanova’s practice.

“Much of Mukazhanova’s work responds to the tension between the rapidly globalized world and traditional ways of life,” Wang notes, describing how the artist uses the dowry as a metaphor that contains both hope and dislocation.

Upstairs, along the main floor of the museum, the hallway is lined with tuskiiz carpets, traditional Kazakh wall hangings from the artist’s personal collection. In pre-Soviet Kazakhstan, where nomadic life informed domestic space, tuskiiz were hung in special places inside the yurt to honor a family’s lineage and to protect them from evil spirits. Such felted objects, which carry memory and ritual, are part of how a soul may transition to the ancestral realm.

By hand, matting and rolling and coaxing, Mukazhanova has gone on to create contemporary responses to tuskiiz that push felt into abstract painterly worlds. The three giant-sized canvases of Post-Nomadic Realities, Untitled (2025), overlooking the CHAT complex, are dramatic in both scale and composition. They retain the portal-like arch of a tuskiiz, even as fuchsia material melts and drags in places like icing across a cake before it’s cooled.

The sheer expansion of the felt medium into unrecognizable territory is a delight of the show. A dark, winding gallery features 84 double-sided felt canvases from Mukazhanova’s Portrait Reflections (on the history of my homeland, Qandy Qantar 2022) (2022-) series arranged off the wall in a labyrinth. The abstract ghostly portraits, made intuitive through her layering and brushing of the fibers, are a freedom.

“The direction of the fibers,” writes Mukazhanova, “follows my bodily movement, leaving visible traces of gesture and effort. The felting process is slow and physically demanding, and for me it has become a ritual of endurance, release and concentration.”

Tendrils of color form deltas, shedding across the work. One yellow portrait has almost a moth-eaten quality, a gaping hole at its center revealing magenta and dark purple fibers beneath. Elsewhere, there are hints of the white serpent, a mythical creature in Kazakh nomadic culture symbolizing the threshold between the living and the spirit world.

Known to withstand the elements, fire as much as water, the felt takes in the sound too. The portraits are heavy with low voices in the gallery and an unbridled, six-channel soundscape by the Kazakh musician SAMRATTAMA, full of wind, the open steppe and Tengrist chants. As Ziyabek has written, Mukazhanova’s felted works become “not only a bridge to ancestors, but also a source of healing.” Mukazhanova will finish this ongoing series when she reaches 262 portraits, one for each life lost during Almaty’s Qandy Qantar, also known as Bloody January, where protesters against rising oil prices were killed by security forces in 2022.

Around that time, Mukazhanova’s sculptures also returned to the figurative: felt casts of her own body. The artist had suffered a great personal loss, the passing of her uncle during the pandemic. “Time loses definition when you think about the souls of your ancestors,” she told me. “The memory is heavy with my uncle’s death alongside Qandy Qantar, alongside the [Soviet-era Asharshylyk] famine,” where a third of the Kazakh population perished between 1930 and 1933. Death is a dislocation that withstands chronology. The pain and the memories pool, one droplet folds into the next, without knowing where one ends and the other begins.

In the middle of a smaller gallery at CHAT, Mukazhanova recreated her installation from Öliara: The Dark Moon (2022), a figurative burial site of soil and silk. The white gauzy silk, wrapping around the site like a serpent, feels alive despite any matter-of-factness. Its transparency giving way to shards of vibrant textile, nostalgia, dirt and reckoning: “from dust you are and dust you shall return.”

The felt skins of the artist’s body, Untitled (2023), rest on the surrounding walls. In their making, Mukazhanova’s hand arches in a wave, as if conducting, drawing wool and old wisdom into a widow’s peak, then out flat.

“Dowry of the Soul” is on view at CHAT through March 1, 2026. 

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