Gulnur Mukazhanova
Gulnur Mukazhanova 1984 was born in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, shortly before the end of the USSR. She studied at the Art Academy in Almaty and the Kunsthochschule in Berlin Weißensee. Still living in Berlin, she has been working for years mainly with textiles. Her artistic practice is deeply influenced by Kazakh textile traditions, with felt serving as one of the central materials in her work. Drawing on traditional craft techniques and contemporary conceptual approaches, Mukazhanova explores themes of memory, identity, and the transformation of cultural values within the post-Soviet and globalized world.
Through repetitive hand processes and multilayered material structures, her works examine how traumatic collective memory, transmitted unconsciously from one generation to another, continues to shape perception, behavior, and the inner structures of contemporary society. By engaging with tactile materials and labor-intensive processes, she creates works that embody both fragility and endurance, reflecting the tensions between preservation and transformation.
Her practice investigates the relationship between personal and collective memory, bodily experience, and cultural heritage, while using artistic processes as a way to observe, uncover, and understand the psychological mechanisms underlying these conditions. Through abstraction, repetition, and materiality, Mukazhanova approaches art as a space for reflection on inherited histories, unresolved trauma, and the subtle ways the past continues to inhabit the present.
Material as Memory
2026
Installation made of velour silk (viscose), diorama
280 × 400 × 300 cm
Courtesy the artist
This site-specific installation by Gulnur Mukazhanova (b. 1984, Semipalatinsk), commissioned for the Kyiv Biennial at KW, unfolds as a charged intervention into architectural space. The work’s built-in niche is lined with magenta-red velour fabric produced in the Soviet-era and now circulating in Uzbek and Kazakh textile markets. This material trajectory recalls longer histories of textile circulation across Central Asia, from Silk Road networks exchange to Soviet industrial standardization and contemporary post-Soviet trade routes across the Asia-Pacific. The fabric thus appears as an archive, holding within its fibers layered economies, ideologies, and migrations.
Mounted onto drywall and then partially scraped away, the velour reveals the fragility of both surface and structure. Torn fabric and fractured plaster expose what is usually concealed, rendering the architectural body wounded and vulnerable. The dislodged material gathers below, forming a soft field of debris. The hollowed niche operates as a portal into a mythical realm of intertwined temporalities and geographies. As in Mukazhanova’s broader practice, the work foregrounds fabric as a carrier of history, where layering material becomes a means of assembling and unsettling the sedimented histories embedded within it. These fragmented textiles – once garments passed between families – become carriers of intergenerational trauma and deep-rooted anxiety born from the forced sedentarization of the Central Asian nomadic peoples.
Working at the intersection of personal memory, post-Soviet material culture, and embodied histories, Mukazhanova treats textiles as containers of affect, labor, and historical residue. Through their tactility, the material itself remembers. Its worn surfaces become a sensory archive, where pain is not only narrated but physically felt across generations.