WHO REMEMBERS?
The first exhibition at TESSERA Exhibition Space
WHO REMEMBERS? became the first exhibition at TESSERA Exhibition Space, a new place for contemporary art at Abu Dhabi Plaza in Astana. The exhibition brings together 17 women artists from Kazakhstan, Iran, Belarus and the United Kingdom, who explore how the experience of our mothers, grandmothers, and women we never knew lives on in our bodies, gestures, habits, and even in silence.
The title holds two questions at once: what does a woman remember, and who remembers her? The artists look for where women's memory lives, and find it in felt, embroidery, syrmak, chapan, ceramics, and an ordinary braid.
Memory, 2024


Artist: Yevgeniya Kazakova

At the heart of the work is the syrmak, a felt carpet that women made together, singing as they worked. Through the craft they passed on their mothers' heritage, and the carpet absorbed their songs, stories and states of mind. Over it, three photographs are combined on transparent fabric: an archival scene of nomadic life, the artist's daily route across the steppe to her studio, and the Karaganda steppe reshaped by industry. The transparency stands for memory that can fade, overlap with other memories and give rise to new stories.

Medium: mixed media; archival and contemporary photographs printed on transparent fabric
Dimensions: 80 × 60 cm


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Women's Heritage, 2026
Artist: Manshuk Yesdaulet

In Kyrgyz sanjyra and Kazakh shezhire, lineage is traced through the male line, and women are almost invisible. Yet their presence survives in textiles made by women's hands: shyrdak, syrmak, chiy, tush kiyiz and kurak. Here a woman's head wearing an elechek, the traditional Kyrgyz headdress, is pieced together in kurak patchwork. The work gives form to the image of a nomadic woman and recalls the women whose stories were never written down.

Medium: textile, thread; kurak patchwork
Dimensions: 60 × 30 × 25 cm


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Interweaving, 2026
Artist: Lizaveta Antropova

A series of three watercolours about the tender bond between generations of women. An everyday ritual — brushing and braiding hair — becomes a gesture of care and a way of passing memory on. As strands are woven into a braid, memories, gestures and stories intertwine, connecting the past with the present.

Medium: watercolour on paper
Dimensions: 45 × 45 cm (52 × 52 cm framed); two works 15 × 15 cm (22 × 22 cm framed)
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The Right to Be, 2026
Artist: Dana Mussina

Red bulls circle a woman: they are the world around her, with its force, aggression, anxiety and anger. Yet she does not fight them — she dances. She has no face; this is not a portrait of one woman but an image of many, each carrying her own experience, fears and the memory of generations. Her dance is not an escape from the world but a way to live in it without losing herself.

Medium: painting
Dimensions: 120 × 100 cm


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Drunk and Insane
Ghazal Abbasi

A self-portrait in a dress that belonged to the artist's grandmother, Saheb Jan. Her husband used to buy her brightly coloured dresses; after his death she never wore colour again. By putting on one of those dresses, Abbasi lets her grandmother's past enter her own body. A single garment becomes an archive of love and loss, linking three generations of women in one family.

Medium: framed photographic print
Dimensions: 20 × 30 cm


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WHO REMEMBERS? WOMEN., 2022
Artist: Zhanna Assanova

The project grew out of the artist's encounter in Pakistan with a grandmother, mother and daughter from the mountainous region of Gilgit-Baltistan, connected by their practice of embroidery. At its centre is a necklace made from three embroideries by these women. Its vertical and horizontal elements recall diagrams of Kazakh shezhire genealogy, but here the line of descent runs through women. The necklace is shown alongside embroideries from other families, photographs of the artisans and a book on Pakistani embroidery.

Medium: contemporary jewellery, hand embroidery
Dimensions: necklace 50 × 20 cm; full display approx. 150 × 150 cm


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Apalar (Older Women), 2026
Artist: Gulbaram Askarova

Two women walk side by side along a winter street. Their long shadows, silhouettes and snow-covered trees speak of time that passes yet stays with us through memory. This everyday scene holds the closeness, care and quiet support we have known since childhood. The collage reflects on the memory of generations and on the people whose presence still warms us years later.

Medium: mixed-media collage
Dimensions: 59 × 42 cm


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Idol, 2021
Artist: Ayazhan Assymi

The sculpture depicts an ordinary Kazakh woman standing firmly on her own two feet. Asymi dedicates it to her grandmother and to every family that passes down the story of one very strong woman. It was her resilience and determination that carried the family through its hardest times.

Medium: sculpture
Dimensions: 70 × 27 × 19 cm


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Forest Chapan, 2026
Artist: Altynay Baizhan

In this work the traditional Kazakh chapan turns into a forest, with clay taking on the texture of wood and earth. Here the chapan is more than a garment: it stands for protection, warmth and the careful keeping of ancestral memory. Every line is shaped by hand, so the act of sculpting becomes a way of remembering through touch. Stripped of decoration, the silhouette becomes a minimalist art object about how tradition takes root.

Medium: grog clay, engobe, glaze
Dimensions: 44 × 30 cm


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Origins, triptych, 2025
Artist: Laila Zharkyn

Three felt sculptures, three states along the path back to oneself, to the land and to one's ancestors. The white vertical "Tinis" (Breath) speaks of beginnings and inner silence. The brown, hill-like "Jer Jurek" (Heart of the Earth) holds layers of ancestral memory and a bond with the soil. The red form "Tuye Taban" (Camel's Footprint) echoes an ancient Kazakh protective ornament and speaks of the body's memory: endurance and knowledge passed on without words.

Medium: felt; wool, natural silk, viscose
Dimensions: 80 × 13 × 13 cm, 36 × 39 × 34 cm, 41 × 35 × 30 cm


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The One I Used to Be, 2025
Artist: Sholpan Makhmudova

A series of three ceramic plates about three stages of a woman's life — girlhood, maturity and old age — embodied by a seed, a flower and a fruit. The girl lives on in the woman, and the woman in the old woman; each carries traces of her own past and the experience of earlier generations. Nothing disappears without a trace — everything is transformed.

Medium: ceramics
Dimensions: three plates, Ø 45 cm


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Heritage, 2026
Artist: Olga Mukayeva

A photograph from an artistic documentary project about the women of Kazakhstan. Women of different ages wear a long braid, a traditional symbol of beauty, coming of age and femininity. In one image two women hold a single braid whose beginning and end cannot be found. It is a metaphor for the unbroken bond between generations and for experience passed from woman to woman — sometimes as a legacy, sometimes as a repeated life story.

Medium: photography
Dimensions: 40 × 30 × 2 cm


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Kitten, 2026
Artist: Renoshni Nazareth

The painting explores dissociation and the tangled relationship between family, memory and non-linear healing. Nazareth revisits her relationship with her estranged mother, reliving childhood memories and stories handed down through generations. In them she notices recurring patterns: her mother's bond with her own mother lives on through tradition, language and culture. Hazy, dreamlike imagery and foreboding eyes convey a numbness in which the body holds the memory of a violent inheritance.

Medium: painting
Dimensions: 50 × 40 × 2 cm


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Otbasy (Family), V gosti (Visiting), Makhabbat (Love), three-panel screen, 2025–2026
Artist: Assel Nurkenova

Three works united by family memory, women's experience and tradition. In Otbasy the yurt becomes a symbol of home, family unity and belonging to one's roots. V gosti is a warm scene in which a child helps a woman lift the hem of her dress — care passed on through simple gestures. The screen Makhabbat, with its pair of swans, speaks of love and fidelity in the language of traditional ornament.

Medium: painting; decorative three-panel screen
Dimensions: 100 × 80 cm; 180 × 50 cm


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Ekinshi Qabat (Second Layer), 2026. Part of the ARQAU project
Artist: Shakir Sheker

A chapan from the Russian Museum of Ethnography, remade: the cut and ornament are kept, but the fabric is replaced with transparent oilcloth and coloured plastic bags. An object frozen behind museum glass can be worn again, even as a raincoat. The work is dedicated to the artist's great-grandmother, the finest maker of zhasau (dowry) in western Kazakhstan, whose pieces people waited a year and a half to receive; not one survives in the family. The chapan is the starting point of ARQAU, an open archive of Kazakh objects where, next to the museum number, appears what museums lack: a family story and the name of the woman who sewed it.

Medium: mixed media; transparent oilcloth, coloured plastic bags
Dimensions: 120 × 160 cm


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