Kazakh protective amulets incorporating family photographs are among the works on display at HIMOYA: Matrilineal Energies, Oracular Kin at the Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture in Almaty. Elsewhere, a pregnant bird-woman stands at the boundary between life and death. Artists from Central Asia and beyond explore how inherited beliefs and women’s experiences help preserve cultural identity.
The exhibition opened on October 15, 2026, and runs through April 4, 2027. It features more than 20 artists and is curated by Natasha Ginwala, who has previously worked on international projects, including the Gwangju and Sharjah biennials.
From Natasha Ginwala’s personal archive.
The title HIMOYA evokes protection across several linguistic traditions. In the participating artists’ works, that includes preserving ancestral memory.
Speaking at the center, Alima Kairat, Tselinny’s artistic director, said the exhibition’s concept had developed over several years.
“For Tselinny, HIMOYA is the culmination of a conversation that began in 2021. We gradually explored questions of maternal memory, rituals, protection, inherited ideas about shame, and care. These themes are deeply rooted in life in Kazakhstan and Central Asia, where ancestral knowledge continues to influence the present and helps us imagine the future in new ways,” she said.
Female Figures and Ancestral Memory
Ginwala’s curatorial concept centers on women’s experiences and knowledge passed down through generations. The artists draw on folk narratives and religious practices, including pre-Islamic steppe beliefs, to reconsider ideas about women’s roles and power.
“During conversations with the artists as we prepared the project, different female figures emerged – nurturing and powerful figures, as well as ‘monstrous’ beings from folk tales, steppe mythology, and pre-Islamic cosmologies,” Ginwala said.
In Kazakh tradition, genealogy is closely linked to the concept of zheti ata, the knowledge of seven generations of ancestors on the paternal side. The custom also served as the basis for prohibitions on marriage between close relatives.
HIMOYA turns to another line of inheritance: the maternal one. The grandmother holds a particularly important place as a guardian of family memory.
This theme intersects with the history of colonial and Soviet pressure on local beliefs. The artists explore how traditions once dismissed as backward or superstitious have survived through family practices and acquired new meanings in contemporary art.
The Bird-Woman Between Two Worlds
One of the exhibition’s central works is Gatekeeper by Rajni Perera, an artist born in Sri Lanka and based in Toronto. Her work draws on South Asian folklore and fantasy to explore migration and motherhood, including questions of reproductive rights.
“Gatekeeper” by Rajni Perera. Image: Theo Frost.
The life-size sculpture was first presented at the 2025 Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates. It depicts a pregnant woman with features of a hornbill and a crow. Its surface is decorated with motifs inspired by azulejos, painted ceramic tiles widely associated with Portugal and shaped by Islamic decorative traditions.
“When I was creating this figure, I was thinking about the umbilical cord because she is pregnant. She seems to pull life out of nonexistence and into being. She is a kind of superheroine, a goddess standing at the boundary between life and its absence,” Perera explained.
Through the hornbill, the artist explores birth and motherhood, while the crow represents ancestral memory.
Water is another important element. When the installation was shown in Sharjah, it stood on the grounds of a former hospital. Wells at the site had once supplied water to the maternity ward. Perera saw this coincidence as adding another layer of meaning to her work.
Prayer Beads and the Colonial Gaze
Sudanese artist Ahmed Umar, who lives in Norway, explores tensions between religious traditions and personal faith.
“Glowing Phalanges” by Ahmed Umar. Image: Max Belech.
His series, Glowing Phalanges, grew out of a memory from his school years in Mecca.
“Its story began at school in Mecca, when a teacher told us that we should never use prayer beads to count our prayers. Instead, we should use our phalanges, or finger bones, because Allah would reward us by making them glow on Judgment Day,” Umar recalled.
The teacher’s instructions conflicted with the artist’s family traditions in Sudan. His relatives used large prayer beads associated with Sufism, a mystical tradition within Islam. Such beads can be used during dhikr, the repeated recitation of God’s names and devotional phrases.
Umar transformed this contradiction into an exploration of religious authority and an individual’s right to determine the form of their own spiritual practice.
In other works, the artist uses souvenirs and objects made from animal remains collected during his years in Norway. He transforms them into objects resembling prayer beads and talismans, drawing attention to colonial attitudes toward nature and culture.
Another installation focuses on Sudanese amulets that were described as inauthentic in British colonial accounts. Beneath an enormous suspended amulet, visitors hear sounds from the artist’s family mosque, spanning the day from fajr, the obligatory dawn prayer, to isha, the night prayer.
The work contrasts colonial judgments about these objects with the religious experiences of the people for whom they held spiritual significance.
Tumar as Resistance to Imposed Gender Roles
Kazakh artist Radina Yasueva draws on the tumar, a traditional protective amulet intended to ward off misfortune and evil forces. Such amulets were made from leather, fabric, or metal, often in a triangular shape. They could contain written prayers or other objects believed to offer protection. Tumars are found in the traditions of various Central Asian peoples.
“The Unconquered” series by Radina Yassuyeva. Image: Max Belech.
For the exhibition, Yassuyeva created the series Tumar Power (2026), continuing her exploration of themes introduced in The Unconquered. In that earlier project, she examined women’s resistance to prescribed family roles.
“For me, the tumar is more than an amulet that protects against the unseen. It is a form of memory in which protection takes on a physical body. At the heart of my Tumar Power are phallic images that were once part of the visual language of The Unconquered series. Now, they return transformed: complex, intricately beaded, restored, and assembled as if from fragments of personal and collective memory. Woven into them are photographs of my parents, my grandmothers, and myself. The faces of those who lived before me become part of my own talisman,” Yassuyeva said.
Her work also addresses motherhood and the figure of the female horse rider, as well as bride kidnapping. Known in Kazakhstan as alyp qashu, bride kidnapping can describe an arrangement agreed upon by a couple or the forcible abduction of a woman for marriage. Coercive abduction has become a focus of criticism in contemporary art and public debate.
“I think of protection as an inheritance passed down through the maternal line. It is an attempt to give form to the invisible power of a mother’s love – a love that outlasts time, distance, and life itself. Protection here does not mean a promise that misfortune will never touch us. It is the presence of those who love us, those who lived before us, and those whose strength we carry forward,” Yassuyeva said.
In the works presented at HIMOYA, protective amulets, devotional objects, and mythological figures become more than elements of traditional heritage. Through them, the artists examine women’s place in society, the right to define one’s own identity, and ways of preserving memory in the aftermath of colonial and ideological pressure.