The Mother Yurt, Ancestral Memory and Post Nomadic Art Practices in Kazakhstan

The opening sequence of All the Dreams We Dream 2020, a hand-drawn animation by the Kazakh artist Asel Kadyrkhanova, places the viewer inside a yurt – a portable, circular dwelling used by nomads across Central Asia. Light shines bright from the entrance, leading the viewer from the inner space of the yurt into the luminous outer world (fig.1). Kadyrkhanova’s animation renders the yurt as an organic, protective membrane that shelters and sustains the body within it. Her imagery, which may evoke the non-encoded experience of birth and our first encounter with light, positions the yurt as a metaphor for the maternal body. This scene of symbolic emergence only lasts for the first twenty seconds of the animation, before the narrative unfolds into a collective story of loss and death.

All the Dreams We Dream is based on Kadyrkhanova’s research into the Asharshylyk (Kazakh famine) of 1930–3. From the mid-nineteenth century, Kazakh lands were gradually absorbed into the Russian Empire, initiating waves of colonisation that disrupted traditional pastoral life. These processes intensified after the October Revolution in 1917, when Soviet authorities began enforcing sedentarisation alongside collectivisation – a policy that combined forced settlement with the nationalisation of livestock and land through collective farms – aimed at replacing mobile herding with state-controlled agriculture.

These policies violently ruptured Kazakh cultural identity and directly triggered the famine through livestock seizures and mass starvation. Soviet authorities transformed pastoral nomads into sedentary peasants, severing them from their ‘Mother Yurt’. The trauma of these events inflicted wounds not only on those who lived through them but also on subsequent generations. Transmitted as inherited grief and memory, this intergenerational trauma shapes the work of many Kazakh artists working today.

Through their distinct but interwoven practices, Asel Kadyrkhanova, Almagul Menlibayeva and Gulnur Mukazhanova engage with inherited knowledge systems, using their work to navigate layers of memory and initiate processes of mourning and healing. For these artists, the yurt functions as both a material and symbolic site of cultural continuity, a vessel through which collective loss and personal memory can be embodied, confronted and transformed. Across their practices, the yurt becomes a space of rematriation – Indigenous women-led work to restore sacred relationships between Indigenous people and their ancestral land. All three artists seek reconnection with their ancestors, attempting to heal the violently severed umbilical cord that once bound them to the Mother Yurt.

The yurt as architecture of nomadic life

To understand nomadic culture it is essential to examine the architecture of the yurt, which is not only a shelter but an embodiment of the conceptual and symbolic order of nomadic life (figs.2 and 3). Structurally it is composed of three main elements: the kerege (lattice wall); shanirak (central crown); and uiq (poles supporting the shanirak). This threefold division extends to the yurt’s felt coverings: twirliq covers the kerege; uzik covers the uiqs; and tundik covers the shanirak. Gulnar Bekberdinova, Senior Research Fellow at the East Kazakhstan Regional Architectural-Ethnographic and Natural-Landscape Museum, Oskemen, notes that the architecture of the yurt reflects a cosmological worldview that divides the universe into three levels – upper, middle and lower – with its three distinct tiers representing the earth, humanity and the sky.1

Within this cosmological understanding, humans are perceived as deeply interconnected with the natural world. The Kazakh people traditionally associate themselves with migratory birds, recognising parallels between their own cyclical movements and the seasonal patterns of avian migration. These connections are embedded in both language and material culture.2 Built from organic materials, the yurt is light enough to transport yet durable enough to provide shelter, enabling nomadic communities to sustain their connection to the natural world through movement.

Many components of the yurt share names with parts of the human body. Its frame is referred to as uidin suiegi (literally, ‘the bones of the home’), while its central point is called kindik (umbilical cord). Individual elements of the lattice wall are named keregenin basy (head), kozi (eyes) and kulagy (ears). The shortest bars of the frame are called balashak (infant) and the upper part of the doorway frame is referred to as mandaisha (forehead).3 Even in its form, the yurt echoes the human body: the curvature of the kanat (an individual section of the lattice wall) closely resembles the arc of a human spine. Through this dense bodily vocabulary, the yurt emerges as a form of biological architecture – its wooden framework functioning as a skeleton, the felt covering as a skin and the tensioning bands as ligaments – an organic system whose structural resilience has been refined over millennia.

This corporeal understanding of the yurt opens onto maternal associations. In his poem Yurt (unknown date), the Tuvan poet Nikolai Kuular (born 1958) draws a powerful parallel between the yurt and the maternal body, comparing its warmth to that of a mother and evoking images of the breast and milk.4 He also highlights the way the yurt, like a mother, ‘remembers the first patter of little feet’. Beyond the maternal breast, the spherical form of the yurt recalls the rounded shape of a pregnant body. Viewed from above, the shanirak resembles a navel, further reinforcing this association. Within nomadic culture the shanirak, which was installed by men and passed from father to son, symbolised unity, family and procreation.

Another layer of symbolic meaning is embedded in the ornaments that adorn the interior and exterior surfaces of the yurt. These motifs are not merely decorative but form a visual language, encoding beliefs and forms of knowledge deeply rooted in nomadic culture. Historically, almost every ornament carried a specific meaning, although much of this knowledge has now been lost. Ornaments appear on the baskurs, the decorative bands that secure the joints of the yurt’s wooden frame and function structurally in much the same way as ligaments in the human body (fig.4). Women, who were responsible for creating baskurs, would often compose messages through ornamental patterns.5 These motifs convey wishes for safety, happiness and the well-being of the family, inscribing sacred and emotional meaning onto the yurt’s felted walls. Married women who left their natal homes would sometimes send ornamented blankets to their relatives, using these visual codes to communicate their emotional state. For instance, a pattern depicting a bird’s beak might signal that the woman was content and felt free in her new household.

Beyond their symbolic significance, the baskurs and other binding bands – such as the bas bau (upper band: head), beldeu bau (middle band: lower back) and aiaq bau (lower band: legs) – are structurally vital (fig.5). Without them, the yurt would lack the tension necessary to remain stable. These bands ‘embrace’ the yurt, a structural and symbolic binding logic that reinforces the yurt’s maternal qualities as a space sustained through care, enclosure and women’s labour. It is this understanding of the yurt that the artists discussed in this article return to, reworking its forms and meanings to address inherited trauma, memory and the possibility of rematriation.

Asel Kadyrkhanova: Inherited trauma and embodied reparation

Asel Kadyrkhanova’s hand-drawn 21-minute animation All the Dreams We Dream is a non-narrative film structured in three acts that draws on memories and archival photographs of the Asharshylyk (Kazakh famine) of 1930–3. The work is based on the memoirs of the Kazakh writers Gafu Kairbekov (1928–1994) and Gabit Musrepov (1902–1985), which were published in Valery Mikhailov’s The Chronicle of Great Jute (1990). Mikhailov’s anthology preserves fragmented testimonies about the collectivisation in Kazakhstan that the author collected in the 1980s.6 Today the number of living witnesses of the famine has dwindled to almost none and source material is limited to oral histories.

Mikhailov’s Chronicle includes Musrepov’s memoir, retold by Kairbekov – a layering of memory across generations that is reflected in the non-linear, fragmentary structure of Kadyrkhanova’s film, where the artist interweaves the memories of the writers with her own. Kadyrkhanova holds the viewer in a liminal space, where the boundary between inside and outside – between the psyche and the outer world – is continuously dissolved. These shifts unfold so smoothly that historical trauma and personal memory become indistinguishable, drawing the viewer into a dream-like state in which collective suffering is experienced as something deeply felt.

The opening sequence of the film, in which the viewer moves from the interior of the yurt into the landscape beyond, is followed by a set of questions that appear on screen: ‘Do all the dreams we dream belong to us? What if they are someone else’s?’ Subsequent text refers to ‘Memories of no one that travel from soul to soul to remind of what once happened on this earth’. Both the first and third acts begin with the same text and footage from the Soviet propaganda film Turksib (1929) by Viktor Turin, which shows Kazakhs of all ages asleep in yurts (fig.6).7 Using charcoal to create a black and white animation, Kadyrkhanova continues the historical narrative in a comparable visual register. Drawing on the visual language of silent film, the artist emphasises the absence of spoken testimony.8

The first act, titled ‘Dreams’, begins with an image of a man asleep in his bed (fig.7). What follows unfolds through fragments of memory, centring on Musrepov’s recollection of visiting an auyl – a rural nomadic settlement – in northern Kazakhstan.9 Looking for survivors, the writer found yurts filled with objects but empty of people (fig.8). In the first act the yurt becomes a space of erasure and decay, where death lingers. A snow-covered landscape becomes a shrouded body (fig.9), while a surreal figure – neither crow nor human, with a swollen belly and protruding ribs – embodies starvation and death (fig.10).

The second act, ‘Time’, returns to 1925 and the of arrival Filipp Goloshchyokin as First Secretary of the Kazakh Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic (ASSR). This moment marks a turning point in the narrative of the famine. Declaring that Kazakh settlements had not yet undergone a true socialist revolution, Goloshchyokin launched the so-called ‘Little October’ in 1928, initiating the aggressive implementation of sedentarisation and collectivisation that contributed directly to the catastrophe later known as ‘Goloshchyokin’s Famine’.

The third act, ‘On This Earth’, represents the return of repressed memories. Here the text from the first act reappears before the story opens with Kairbekov’s earliest memory, the image of a bright full moon. Travelling in a cart on a cold autumn night when he was about two years old (fig.11), the writer saw what he initially took to be trees lining the road – forms he then understood to be frozen corpses. The image of the moon, engrained so vividly in Kairbekov’s memory, becomes a recurring metaphor in the film. Kadyrkhanova expands it into a maternal symbol that connects personal recollection to the lost Mother Yurt (fig.12).

To create the animation Kadyrkhanova made approximately two thousand drawings, working from archival photographs that capture the aftermath of the famine. Kadyrkhanova has described the physical toll of this process, noting that her body often responded in pain, with her stomach, arms and legs trembling.10 Confronting the ethical difficulty of representing historical suffering, she reflects on the paradox of depicting extreme suffering without re-enacting the violence or becoming complicit in its spectacle.11 Kadyrkhanova approaches these images with empathy and restraint. Focusing on metaphorical and allegorical expression, she seeks to ‘create a work that would convey the horror of what happened without speculating on the images of the victims’.12

The Kazakh famine stands among one of the most devastating yet least studied catastrophes of Soviet rule. Suppressed in official histories until Kazakhstan’s independence in 1991, it remains relatively little known outside of Central Asia. Although official records were manipulated and remain difficult to verify, estimates suggest that around one and a half million people died, nearly a quarter of the republic’s population. Of these fatalities around one million were ethnic Kazakhs, representing the loss of almost forty per cent of the Kazakh population. Mass displacement and the destruction of over ninety per cent of livestock further devastated nomadic life, leaving demographic and cultural ruptures whose consequences are still unfolding.13

The famine provides an essential context for understanding how trauma may be transmitted across generations. Kadyrkhanova has noted that the ‘unshared memories lived and died with their owners’, leaving behind a vast layer of unspoken experience nearly erased from history.14 Scholarship has emphasised that unacknowledged or silenced trauma can persist across generations. Writing on Holocaust survivors, the psychoanalyst Caroline Garland observes that ‘hidden or denied parental devastation’ may be carried unconsciously by children and grandchildren.15 In this view, trauma disrupts the foundations of identity, and processes of healing require that memory be gradually integrated into conscious life rather than remaining suppressed.

This sense of unresolved presence is evoked in Kadyrkhanova’s recurring image of the empty yurt. As the art historian Griselda Pollock notes, trauma inhabits the psyche as a ‘foreign resident’: perpetually present, yet never truly known.16 In Kadyrkhanova’s film the abandoned yurt becomes an empty shell – a once-living space transformed into a spiralling void, charged with an inaccessible presence and the weight of histories never fully confronted. In this way, Kadyrkhanova frames the post-Soviet condition as a timeless space of unresolved trauma.

The artist extends this inquiry into the urban environment in her series Windows of Tolerance 2017, which captures traces of post-Soviet control in Almaty, the former capital of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. Kadyrkhanova photographed the barred windows of houses across the city and printed the images onto canvas, embroidering the metal grills with red thread (figs.13 and 14). The artist has described these grills ‘as a symptomatic manifestation of post-Soviet trauma in the lived space’.17

Kadyrkhanova embroiders her canvases while wearing surgical gloves, as if suturing a wound. She explains that embroidery, although often dismissed as ‘feminine work’, is a physically demanding and time-consuming process. For the artist, embroidery is ‘both a mimetic act that reconstructs or mimics the work of trauma, and an attempt to heal what cannot be healed’.18 As Garland emphasises, the word ‘trauma’ derives from Greek, where it refers to ‘a piercing of the skin, a breaking of the bodily envelope’; unlike physical injuries, such wounds do not heal organically.19 Kadyrkhanova’s embroideries thus become both sites of pain and gestures of repair – visual metaphors for the deep, unhealed ruptures left by history. According to the artist, ‘embroidery does not tolerate rush but teaches care, patience, and resilience’, functioning both as an act of memory and a conscious return to the body.20

Through this embodied practice, Kadyrkhanova reconnects with matrilineal traditions of textile labour historically carried out within the yurt. The body emerges as both medium and site of memory: not merely located in space, but constituting space itself. By transferring images of concrete architecture onto canvas, the artist symbolically returns rigid post-Soviet structures to the soft, bodily logic of the yurt. The repetitive motion of needle piercing and re-emerging from the surface becomes a material metaphor for trauma’s cyclical return, echoing Sigmund Freud’s concept of repetition compulsion as a form of unconscious remembering.21 In this looped gesture, Kadyrkhanova constructs an imaginary space in which repetition functions as reclamation rather than reenactment; it becomes a means of agency, transformed from passive replay into active, deliberate choice. Through this embodied practice, she attempts to process a form of inherited anxiety too vast to be fully assimilated.

Gulnur Mukazhanova: The myth of mankurt and the tactical surface

Throughout her practice Gulnur Mukazhanova draws on the myth of the mankurt, a Central Asian legend popularised by Chingiz Aitmatov’s novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years (1980).22 According to the legend, mankurts were enslaved prisoners subjected to torture that erased their memory, leaving them unable to recognise their origins or kin. Drawing upon this legend, Mukazhanova uses photography, sculpture and installation to reflect on the erosion of Kazakh cultural identity under Soviet rule. While memory and trauma are central to her practice, the artist also considers how political transformation and modernisation may sever embodied links to tradition, language and ancestral modes of dwelling.

Working in the aftermath of Soviet collapse and Kazakhstan’s integration into global capitalism, Mukazhanova investigates shifting forms of Kazakh identity and the transformation of traditional Kazakh values. Her practice reflects on what she has described as the post-nomadic condition, in which inherited cultural structures persist in altered and fragmented forms. Mukazhanova approaches questions of memory, identity and historical rupture through embodied art practice, using material processes rooted in nomadic traditions to explore how ancestral knowledge survives displacement and social transformation.

In contrast to materials associated with permanence and monumentality in classical Western sculpture, such as bronze or marble, Mukazhanova privileges mutable and organic materials that challenge notions of permanence. The artist primarily works with felt, a textile produced by matting, condensing and pressing fibres together. Deeply embedded in Kazakh culture and central to the construction of the yurt, felt becomes both material and metaphor within her practice. Mukazhanova has described felt as a ‘mystic material that beckons her’, emphasising both its physical and symbolic resonance.23 In Kazakh tradition felt making was predominantly women’s work, with skills passed from mother to daughter within domestic and communal settings. By returning to this material, Mukazhanova reactivates embodied forms of knowledge and re-establishes continuity with matrilineal practices.

In Mukazhanova’s work the dynamics of trauma manifest as what Pollock terms ‘perpetual presentness’ and ‘permanent absence’.24 Through repetition and multiplication, the artist visualises a condition in which identity appears suspended between persistence and erasure. Reflecting on the effects of globalisation and the erosion of traditional values, Mukazhanova has described her concern with a world increasingly characterised by sameness.

In the series Global Society 2013 Mukazhanova photographed individuals holding identical masks in front of their face, obscuring their identities, while their clothing and domestic interiors can reveal traces of their distinct cultural backgrounds (fig.16). The masks used in this series originated in the artist’s installation Transformation of Traditional Values During Globalisation 2013–6, which comprises numerous hand-made felt masks cast from the artist’s face, glued together and presented as a suspended, skin-like layer (fig.15). Although the individual masks retain their form, the artist preserves the fluidity of the installation by adapting it to each exhibition space (see figs.18 and 19). The installation changes shape with every assembly, reflecting the spatial practices of Mukazhanova’s nomadic ancestors, for whom dwelling was defined by movement rather than permanence.

For sculptures made as part of her series Post-Nomadic Reality 2013–ongoing, the artist used casts of her body to create felt ‘skins’. Some of the resulting sculptures appear mutilated and partially burned, while others are flayed and missing limbs or faces (fig.17). For Mukazhanova, these sculptures serve as surfaces onto which she projects memory and absence, with the felt giving physical form to what might otherwise remain unarticulated.

The skin-like quality of Mukazhanova’s suspended surfaces and figurative sculptures invites a reading through psychoanalytic theories of embodiment. Her use of felt resonates with Didier Anzieu’s concept of the ‘skin-ego’, which the psychoanalyst developed from Freud’s notion of the ego as a ‘body ego’ in The Ego and the Id (1923). The ‘skin-ego’ is understood as a psychic envelope through which relations between the interior and the exterior are negotiated. 25 Anzieu emphasises its dual nature, aligning it with Freud’s conception of the ego as both a protective shield and a surface upon which experience is inscribed. In this sense, personal and collective histories may be understood as inscribed on the body itself.

Mukazhanova’s choice of material gains further resonance through Anzieu’s analogy between the skin and felt. Emphasising its intricate composition of interwoven tissues that protect the body, Anzieu notes that the dermis – the thick, middle layer of skin – has a ‘resistant and elastic felt-like structure, an “amorphous cement” made up of intertwining sheaves of fibrillae’.26 Anzieu elaborates on the skin’s paradoxical nature – it is permeable yet defensive, elastic yet prone to shrinkage when removed, capable of producing pleasure and pain. It is, he suggests, a surface of contradictions: solid yet fragile, a boundary that occupies a transitional space.

Mukazhanova’s use of natural felt – made from sheep’s wool or animal fur – resonates with this corporeal duality. Situated between the organic and the representational, the material serves as a transitional surface onto which memory, identity and trauma can be inscribed. The artist emphasises this bodily relation, remarking that ‘[the] body and felt are inseparable, as during the work process there is a direct contact through the hands ... the body for me relates to the soul, it is alive while the soul is there’. The hand and touch are central to Mukazhanova’s artistic process: she begins with raw wool and through layering, pressing and massaging interwoven fibres, gradually forms a unified felt surface.

Anzieu argues that the skin holds primacy among the senses because it is the only organ that fully envelops the body, echoing Freud’s notion of tactile reflexivity. As Freud observes, ‘the child who touches the part of his body with his finger is testing out the two complementary sensations of being a piece of skin that touches at the same time as being a piece of skin that is being touched’.27 Through this reciprocal sensation, subjectivity emerges through contact, establishing the skin as a boundary and a relation. Expanding this idea, Anzieu describes the maternal envelope that surrounds the infant with an external layer of care and communication, ‘an envelope made up of messages’ that adjusts itself to the child’s bodily surface.28 In this framework identity develops not as an isolated interior state but through tactile exchange, proximity and protection – processes grounded in touch and embodied interaction.

This maternal envelope resonates with earlier discussions of the yurt’s structure, specifically the baskurs. These bands were not only structural supports but also carriers of familial memory, enclosing inhabitants within a protective yet communicative membrane. Drawing on the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s notion of ‘holding’ – the mother’s physical and emotional support of the infant – Anzieu maintains that the skin-ego originates as an extension of the mother’s body, particularly her hands.29 Mukazhanova’s felt-making can thus be seen to enact this maternal logic of care, contact and communication.

Mukazhanova’s practice confronts the historical losses and collective trauma experienced by the Kazakh people, while also revealing hope through the invisible threads of ancestral knowledge embedded in her work. Traditional Kazakh felt-making becomes a charged, almost mystical medium, carrying the energy of matrilineage. In this way, the ruptures of history are neither denied nor erased but held and gradually reconciled through the symbolic reconnection to the Mother Yurt.

Almagul Menlibayeva: Ritual and ancestral memory

Almagul Menlibayeva’s video work Exodus 2009 opens in a desolate steppe landscape filled with architectural ruins, a haunting setting intensified by the appearance of two female figures dressed in black dresses, their long hair partially veiling their faces (fig.20). Moving slowly and decisively to an unsettling electronic soundscape, the women traverse the stark landscape, making enigmatic yet ceremonial gestures. These scenes are intercut with sequences depicting nomads dismantling yurts and packing their belongings. The film location, a former Soviet concentration camp, was a deliberate choice. For Menlibayeva, the ruins represent a structure of trauma that continues to operate in the present: the ruin is ‘not a “singular” building as object, but rather the archaeology of a bygone era of industrialisation: the former collective and state farms and the infrastructure constructed during the Soviet period’.30

Drawing on the Book of Exodus, Menlibayeva adapts the narrative to Kazakh history and nomadic migration. The film unfolds over eleven minutes in a dual narrative structure, in which two stories occupy the same landscape. One follows the enigmatic female figures, who symbolise Peris – supernatural beings from ancient Iranian mythology – while the other documents the movements of a group of nomads preparing to migrate (fig.21), with a little girl observing.

The Peris and the little girl are recurring protagonists in Menlibayeva’s photography and video work, through which the artist engages with themes of cultural memory, nomadism and post-Soviet identity, often drawing on myth, ritual and folklore. While acknowledging the Iranian origins of the Peri, where it embodies the woman’s fight for existence in a man’s world, the artist believes that the figure predates Islam and emerged from a period of cross-cultural exchange. For Menlibayeva, Peris are magical female beings whose ‘power can be understood as a child’s projection onto the mother – for a child, the mother is capable of everything, she is a magician’.31 Filming at historically charged sites, Menlibayeva invites her participants to embody the power of the Peri.32

The artist frequently situates her work within the vast landscapes of Kazakhstan, using human figures to explore migration, continuity and rupture. Exodus was filmed across one of the largest Soviet-era Gulag labour camps, located in the Karaganda Region, where the artist’s grandmother, a survivor of the Kazakh famine, and her mother are buried.33 When Menlibayeva was around thirteen she learned about the famine from her grandmother. It was then that the artist came to understand that alongside official history there existed a parallel ‘people’s history’, transmitted discreetly through older generations.34

Menlibayeva’s work operates in a liminal space between reality and imagination; by combining staged performance with documentary approaches, she evokes surreal and dreamlike atmospheres. In Exodus, sequences alternate between images of nomads and the bare, skeletal shell of a yurt – a dwelling drained of life (fig.22). The Peris intermittently appear, immobilised and wrapped in a shroud, disappearing to leave only traces of fabric, or carrying and playing with infants in the vast steppe. Their gestures towards the children are deliberately ambiguous, inviting reflection on the complexity of motherhood. At the centre of this dreamscape is the little girl, who remains largely motionless as others pack and depart (fig.23). She, like the Peris, is left behind. This lingering image evokes the sensation of an anxiety dream, a psychic state of immobility and helplessness heightened by the presence of the mummified Peri and the isolated child. Yet Menlibayeva offers no resolution: the video ends suspended in a moment of profound uncertainty.

In the context of Menlibayeva’s practice, Anzieu’s discussion of the term pellicule – the French word for both a biological membrane and a strip of photographic or cinematic film – becomes especially relevant. Anzieu describes it as ‘the thin layer serving as a base for the sensitive coating that is to receive the impression’, functioning as an interface between external stimuli and internal pressures.35 Comparing film to a dream, Anzieu explains that both replicate the function of the skin-ego by registering traces and inscriptions on a sensitive surface. Crucially, in moments of trauma, when overwhelming external excitation breaches the protective shield of the psyche, the dream can still reweave the skin-ego.36 In other words, dreaming offers a way to restore or repair the mental envelope that keeps inner and outer worlds in balance. In anxiety or post-traumatic dreams, the ‘dreamer repetitively relives the circumstances preceding the accident ... but they always stop just short of representing the accident, as if it could be retrospectively deferred and avoided at the last moment’.37 Menlibayeva’s suspended dream sequences in Exodus enact this same deferral, presenting traces of trauma and memory on a fragile, almost cinematic surface.

The medium of video allows Menlibayeva to manipulate the temporal dimensions of memory and history. Events can be paused, rewound and replayed, disrupting the linear flow of lived experience and creating conditions for reflection and ritualised enactment. The artist employs rewinding as a technique in her single-channel video work Apa 2003, which opens in the snow-covered mountain range of Alatau, specifically the peak of Khan Tengri on the border of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and China (fig.24). In the video, seven nude women, including the artist herself, are shown half-emerged from snowbanks. The women repeatedly fall into long trances during which they insistently repeat the word Apa, a Kazakh term used for mother, grandmother or woman. The work originated as a live performance that Menlibayeva later captured on film, with the final artwork comprising a rewinding of the original footage.

Apa references the Kazakh tradition of Zheti Ata, a genealogical practice that requires individuals to know the names of male ancestors up to the seventh generation. Menlibayeva reclaims this patriarchal custom through what she describes as a form of ‘shamanistic feminism’, reorienting its focus from forefathers to foremothers and invoking the cosmological duality of Tengri (Father Sky) and Umai (Mother Earth) in nomadic Tengrism. According to this belief system, which is rooted in the natural world, Tengri represents the infinite, while Umai represents finite existence.38 Tengri may also be read as a metaphor for the psyche, while Umai corresponds to the body. The yurt, as an organic architectural membrane, mediates between these two domains: it shelters ephemeral human life while remaining open to the infinite psychical realm above. In Apa, Menlibayeva creates visual symmetries between the contours of mountains, breasts and the snowbanks from which the women emerge – evoking the symbolic language encoded in the ornamental forms of the yurt. The snowbanks might also suggest a yurt buried in snow, with the women reborn from a dormant, sheltered space.

Through manipulation of the video, Menlibayeva underscores the cyclical temporality of trauma and memory. Her reversal of footage creates a sense of looping time, making actions and gestures appear to unfold again and again, visually enacting the repetition of memory and ancestral presence. Menlibayeva’s use of the linguistic symmetry of the word Apa reinforces this motif, linking auditory and visual cycles to evoke the persistence of trauma. While the scene might suggest a liminal state, a struggle to be re-born, the frozen snowbanks may also be read as a metaphor for a self-preserving, traumatised psyche suspended in time, poised on the brink of dissolution yet enclosed in a protective envelope.

The motif of traumatic repetition is further reinforced through the repeated utterance of the word Apa, as the women’s vocal tones shift from calm invocation to increasing panic, culminating in hopelessness. The compulsive repetition of the word, paired with the trance-like movement of the performers, functions as a ritualistic attempt to reconnect with an ancestral feminine presence. By participating in the ritual, Menlibayeva frames the work as a personal and collective act of rebirth and reconnection, engaging with memory, embodiment and ancestral legacy across generations.

Through these visual and performative strategies, the video enacts a symbolic reconstitution of the Mother Yurt, foregrounding the embodied, maternal dimensions of memory and care. The women emerge as figures who inhabit and protect the space, echoing the nurturing, enveloping logic of the yurt. The ritual interaction with the landscape evoke the transmission of knowledge, cultural memory and care across generations. By situating the body, psyche and architecture within a liminal, dreamlike space where past and present, interior and exterior converge, Menlibayeva opens a space for remembrance and continuation of ancestral legacies.

Closing reflections

Throughout this article, the yurt has been considered not simply as a shelter but as a metaphor for a maternal membrane, a bio-architecture through which cosmology, social structure and cultural memory converge. Central to nomadic existence, the yurt became a living repository of knowledge, inscribed and sustained by generations of women through textile practices and ornamental languages.

This way of life and knowledge sharing was violently disrupted by collectivisation and sedentarisation, famine and cultural suppression, which fractured nomadic life worlds, severing relationships between the body, dwelling and memory. The resulting rupture left cultural and psychological traces that continue to shape contemporary Kazakh art practice.

The three artists discussed here approach this legacy through distinct yet interconnected practices. Almagul Menlibayeva, Gulnur Mukazhanova and Asel Kadyrkhanova's compulsion to repeat captures the existence of the unknown – the history that was suppressed and kept silent – and the unknowable – trauma that was never truly known.39 Kadyrkhanova’s repetition is manual and wounding. Through embodied practices, such as embroidery, she pierces and sutures skin-like surfaces, re-enacting rupture while attempting repair. Mukazhanova’s repetition is formative and grounded. Engaging with felt, she employs processes that echo the construction of the yurt. Felt becomes both skin and boundary, vulnerable yet capable of holding. Menlibayeva’s repetition is temporal and ritualistic. Both directing and performing in her work, the artist invokes personal and collective memory. Working through her own body helps Menlibayeva relate to the issues she explores in her videos, thereby registering the memory as in Anzieu’s pellicule dream space.

Through different approaches, all three artists locate the yurt as a maternal body, which helps them reconnect with the past, navigate through the layers of memory and initiate the process of mourning and healing.