Kazakhstan (Republic of)

Qoñyr is one of the key concepts of Kazakh cosmology. It is not only a colour, but also a sonic register, the scent of earth and an attentiveness to barely perceptible vibrations, breath and wind, making audible what is usually displaced by noise.

The curatorial inquiry departs from Äbiken Khasenov’s küy Qoñyr, a traditional Kazakh musical composition in which minor tuning operates as a cultural optic. This mode enables an engagement with historical trauma without monumentalisation. The exhibition turns towards the “Archive of Silence” – forms of memory that do not crystallise into ideological narratives, yet continue to function through the body, voice and landscape.

Minor küys such as Qoñyr emerged primarily in the twentieth century. Major modal structures dominated earlier layers of Kazakh musical culture; compositions about death often affirmed it as part of the life cycle rather than as an ending. The turn toward a minor sonority coincides with a profound transformation of historical experience.

Taken as a whole, the exhibition forms the image of a hybrid subject emerging at the intersection of myth and technology, archive and body, historical violence and the memory of the steppe, translating lived experience into a qoñyr-voice that manifests a new layered identity.