Kyrgyz Republic

Alexey Morosov brings the values, traditions and culture of Kyrgyzstan to the Biennale Arte 2026. Together with the curator, he has developed an exhibition concept that expresses his vision of contemporary Kyrgyz identity, drawing on millennia-old history, myth and an active material memory, thereby offering a synthetic yet exemplary immersion into what it means to belong to that remote territory.

In modern Kyrgyz, belek means “gift”, the core concept of the project, which addresses an issue at once global and deeply national: how a small mountain people at the heart of Asia manages the most precious resource of the twenty-first century – water – while remaining faithful to its memory, its cultural code and its land.

Alongside this central idea, two further anthropological and cultural nodes emerge: kok-börü, an ancient Central Asian equestrian sport and an expression of movement across the steppe, where men and horses are connected along their spines and transformed into hybrid, mythological creatures – the centaurs; and the mantric recitation of Manas, the epic of the Kyrgyz people, whose half a million verses are considered the largest oral narrative ever transmitted in human history. The flow of words, chanted by the singers in an almost trance-like state, as if emerging from silence, seals and concludes the narrative.