Kazakhstan’s Venice Biennale Pavilion Turns Silence Into Something You Can Hear
By Keshav AnandRainclouds hang over Venice all morning, flattening the light around the Arsenale into shades of silver and grey as crowds move between pavilions clutching umbrellas and damp press releases. By the time I arrive at the Kazakhstan Pavilion inside the Museo Storico Navale, the vernissage has already thickened into its usual frenzy. “When I first encountered the Biennale’s curatorial concept, In Minor Keys, it immediately led me to the notion of qoñyr in Kazakh culture,” curator Syrlybek Bekbota tells me.
Qoñyr is a fundamental concept in Kazakh cosmology. While it literally means brown, the word also refers to a certain texture of sound, silence, and atmosphere. “In the Kazakh worldview, qoñyr is a state, a rhythm, a voice, even a way of sensing time,” the curator shares. It can describe the smell of earth, a low sonic register, or a silence that holds meaning without speaking. At its core, qoñyr is an attentiveness to subtle things like wind, breath, and footsteps, making audible what is usually lost beneath noise.
Walking into the pavilion, I am immediately confronted by a series of enormous horse heads. Smail Bayaliyev’s Steppe Architectonics occupies the opening room with startling force. These monumental forms rise upwards into the cavernous height of the building, making the already vast pavilion feel even larger. The installation pulls your gaze directly towards the ceiling. Even in a packed room of curators, collectors and journalists, people stop when they enter. You become conscious of sound, height, movement and proximity.
The pavilion’s atmosphere is shaped by Dübir, the sound work by ADYR ASPAN that threads through the exhibition. You hear it before locating it. The soundscape changes constantly as you move between floors. Speakers positioned at different heights allow hoofbeats, voices and vibrations to drift in and out depending on where you stand. “From the beginning I had the idea that viewers would first hear the sounds of the steppe while still in the urban space,” Bekbota explains, “and that these sounds would gradually intensify as they approached the pavilion.”
“The thunder of hooves, the creak of wagon wheels, a drawn out song, children’s voices – these were not mere background, but a system of orientation in space and time,” curator and researcher Gulmaral Tattibayeva, part of ADYR ASPAN, tells me. “The steppe is not silence; it is a different acoustics – horizontal, open, where sound dissolves rather than bounces off walls.”
Qoñyr: the Archive of Silence reveals itself through atmosphere, memory and fragments rather than direct narrative. “We deliberately don’t explain,” Tattibayeva says. “Collective memory is not archival – it pulses and lives in the body. We leave the listener a gap between recognition and the unknown.” Bekbota thinks about the exhibition in much the same way. “I approached the pavilion not as an informational or illustrative space, but as an environment that invites the viewer into an inward act of listening.”
This invitation to listen pervades the entire exhibition. Bekbota describes the pavilion as a space shaped by “stories that were not spoken openly, yet did not disappear.” He explains, “These invisible layers are preserved in the landscape, in the body, and in collective memory. This is where the title Archive of Silence emerged from.”
Upstairs, Ardak Mukanova’s Qoñyr Äulie: Diving into the Quiet Depths transforms one of the darker rooms into something between cave, dream and digital reconstruction. The three-channel installation draws on the sacred cave Qoñyr Äulie in East Kazakhstan, a site associated with healing and pilgrimage for centuries. “The installation follows a descent into layered cultural and spiritual spaces, almost like moving through geological strata of memory,” Mukanova says. “In Qazaq cosmology, caves are often understood as portals or thresholds connected to transformation and rebirth.”
The final section uses LiDAR scans of the cave itself, transformed into a glowing digital landscape that feels both sacred and synthetic. Figures move slowly through the darkness as though entering another temporal register entirely. “For me, this digital copy became a kind of contemporary pilgrimage site, where technology interacts with collective memory and spiritual experience,” the artist explains. Like the rest of the pavilion, the work resists fixed interpretation. “I think I am more interested in creating a feeling or atmosphere than giving a complete explanation,” Mukanova says. “Sometimes what remains unspoken carries more weight than something fully explained.”
That tension between hearing and understanding appears again in Mansur Smagambetov’s The Audibility of Childhood, one of the exhibition’s most affecting works. Combining AI-generated domestic interiors with fragments of Soviet television broadcasts, the installation revisits the artist’s memories of growing up near a nuclear testing site. “For me as a child, this was one of the very few ways in which my city could appear on central television,” Smagambetov says. “Hearing its name spoken from the metropolis produced a strong sense of recognition and pride.”
The work captures the distance between language and comprehension with unsettling precision. “The installation focuses on this contradiction,” he says, “the child’s pride and excitement, and the reality of what is being reported, which remains outside of their comprehension.”
Nearby, Nurbol Nurakhmet’s Kitchen Recipes collages place mushroom clouds alongside scenes of cooking and domestic routine, collapsing nuclear history into the texture of everyday life. Elsewhere, Smagambetov and Oralbek Kaboke use the traditional Qazaq round table as a structure for conversations around memory, history and the reshaping of the steppe during the Soviet period.
Throughout the exhibition, history never settles into a single official narrative. Bekbota keeps returning instead to intimacy, memory and lived experience. He also speaks about resisting the hierarchy that still frames many non-Western cultural forms within contemporary art institutions. Discussing his work Aitys: The Limits of Translation, Bekbota says, “I sought to approach aitys not as an ‘ethnographic object,’ but as a living form capable of entering into dialogue with contemporary cultural and artistic discourse… In my view, art still often preserves a hierarchical and imperialist perspective, in which some cultural forms are considered ‘contemporary,’ while others are seen as ‘traditional’ or ‘peripheral.’ It was important for me to rethink these boundaries.”
That openness extends to the structure behind the pavilion itself. This is the first Central Asian pavilion at Venice assembled through an open-call process. “I believe that the decision by the Ministry of Culture and Information this year to select the curator through an open competition was an important step,” Bekbota says, “one that provided equal opportunities to all participants.”
By the time I leave, the rain outside is heavier, hammering against the canals and sending visitors rushing beneath doorways and awnings. But the sound of hoofbeats still echoes behind me. “Some stories continue to exist not as documents in an archive,” Bekbota tells me earlier, “but as sound, atmosphere, bodily sensation, or a quiet inner resonance.”
Feature image: Kazakhstan Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2026. ©️ Photo by Luca Girardini, 2026. Courtesy of A&A Worldwide