An ambiguity – between self-possession and spectacle – is central to the Almaty artist’s work
A woman stands before the Aisha Bibi Mausoleum in southern Kazakhstan, wrapped in sweeping red fabric. Her arms are partially bound, the fabric both chrysalis- and shroudlike, gesturing towards metamorphosis and enclosure. Her posture is upright, composed. On her head, a tower of stacked skullcaps – teetering, perilously – draws the eye upward. Behind her rises a twelfth-century funerary monument, its surface covered with more than 60 distinct terracotta tile patterns, each intricately carved with floral and geometric designs. This is Red Butterfly (2012), a photograph by Almagul Menlibayeva and part of her ongoing series My Silk Road to You (2010–), in which the artist examines how identity, gender and heritage in Central Asia are shaped by layered histories of empire, trade and erasure of the region’s cultural memory.
Located just outside the city of Taraz, the Aisha Bibi Mausoleum is one of the few surviving medieval monuments in the region dedicated to a woman. According to legend, Aisha was either a young bride who died en route to her forbidden wedding, or a rebel-martyr killed for resisting patriarchal authority. In either version, she is mythologised not for what she did, but for what was taken from her – her life, her agency, her image. What remains is a monument and a legend, both shaped by absence. There is no epic mural depicting her bravery, no heroic narrative of action – only a structure built in mourning, which has since become a monument to love and loss, and stories passed down in fragments. Menlibayeva’s photograph doesn’t depict Aisha directly; instead, it stages the unresolved tensions her story leaves behind. The image becomes less a portrait than a reflection of contradiction – between honouring and erasure, the idealisation of women and their historical invisibility. This invisibility, in Kazakhstan as elsewhere, has been compounded by both colonial suppression and lingering codes of uyat (shame), which continue to dictate the boundaries of acceptable female behaviour.
The composition is stark, tightly balanced. Red against beige. Fabric against stone. The symmetry of the whole is almost devotional – the vertical line of the mausoleum echoing the central figure’s stance. Behind her, the mausoleum asserts itself quietly but unmistakably: its firm vertical thrust – edging, to my eye at least, into the phallic – frames her, as though a visual code for authority and containment. And yet the meaning remains unsettled. Is the woman emerging, as if breaking through her fabric pupa to mark her presence? Or is she immobilised – encased, cocooned, bound by the very materials that give her visual power? There is an allusion to religious iconography, too, where the figure could appear variously as angel, saint or martyr, and the composition’s stylised precision reinforces this reading: the clean lines, colour contrasts and absence of dust or disorder evoke ritual purity and transcendence. Yet there’s also an element of theatricality – in the height of the skullcaps, the gleaming silk, the exaggerated symmetry – that introduces another register that is performative, staged and uncanny. She is both elevated and constrained, a symbolic body made radiant through restriction.
This ambiguity – between self-possession and spectacle – is central to Menlibayeva’s work. Born in Almaty, the artist came of age during the final decades of the Soviet Union. Her practice spans photography, video, textile and digital media, and often returns to the role of women in Central Asian histories and visual cultures. In My Silk Road to You, she draws on trade routes, mythologies and Soviet-era cultural erasures to examine how identity – particularly female identity – is shaped by shifting narratives of nationhood, heritage and modernity. The richly coloured fabric, in this image and across the series, becomes more than adornment. Its presence signals, more broadly, the region’s long histories of women’s labour – spinning, weaving and dyeing – alongside ritual use and textile exchange along the ancient Silk Road (on which Taraz was a major trading centre). The colour red amplifies this complexity. It is symbolic in multiple registers: the blood of martyrdom, revolution, fertility, danger. In Central Asian contexts, red has traditionally been used to mark both celebration and protection. In Soviet contexts, it carried a different weight – power, conformity, ideology – with red the colour often synonymous with the revolutionary ideals of the Bolsheviks. Menlibayeva folds these associations together. Her figure is wrapped in red, but it is not clear if the colour signifies empowerment or enclosure. That instability is part of the image’s force.
Then there are the skullcaps, stacked almost absurdly high on and around the woman’s head. They might reference the takiya, worn by men and women across Central Asia in religious and folk settings, but here they take on a surreal or parodic dimension, almost akin to ceremonial drag. There’s even a faint echo of science fiction: a likeness to Princess Amidala from Star Wars, whose costumes deliberately collapse Orientalist aesthetics into futuristic alienation. Whether intentional or not, the resemblance underscores how the Western gaze that has long exoticised Central Asian bodies – as decorative or ‘other’. Menlibayeva taps into that gaze but doesn’t fully satisfy it. Instead, through the staged nature of the image, she casts a performance that feels self-aware and uncanny – drawing the viewer in, but also holding them at a critical distance.
So, who is the ‘you’ in My Silk Road to You? Is it the West? The East? A former lover? The viewer? Or perhaps an imagined ancestral self? And to whom does the ‘my’ refer – whose journey or memory is being claimed? These pronouns remain deliberately unpinned, inviting multiple interpretations and creating space for ambivalence. Reflecting this openness, the female figures throughout the series refuse to be simplified either as patriotic icons or as exoticised symbols of local culture. Instead, they embody what the artist calls ‘archaic atavism’ – a postcolonial memory that is fluid, embodied and resistant to easy definition.
In Red Butterfly, the woman does more than stand before the mausoleum – she inhabits it, embodying the ongoing negotiation of female identity within Kazakhstan’s fractured history. Many sites like Aisha Bibi’s were neglected or repurposed during the Soviet era, part of a wider cultural erasure that disrupted the transmission of pre-Soviet traditions. Women’s roles, once central in oral traditions, textile production and spiritual practices, were recast within Soviet narratives of gender equality and labour, often at the cost of local memory. Here, one woman’s body becomes the mediator of collective histories, transforming the personal into the universal. Her presence challenges the monument as a fixed symbol, turning it into a living space where traditional and contemporary womanhood intersect. The site becomes a threshold – a space where the myths of the past are reinhabited by the bodies of the present.
Almagul Menlibayeva: I Understand Everything is on show at the Almaty Museum of Arts, through May 2026
From the September 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
