Gulnur Mukazhanova’s Art Transforms Felt into Feelings

This story was produced and developed with the support of CHAT as paid content.

In her Berlin studio, Gulnur Mukazhanova is on her hands and knees smoothing out a large canvas of felt. Its colours are vibrant black and red, reminiscent of a Mark Rothko painting, geometric forms blurred at the edges.

She uses techniques passed down by generations of Kazakh women but interpreted for a modern world. It’s a deeply physical process. She kneads, pulls apart and tamps down wool often with the force of her entire body, spraying it with soapy water so the individual fibers tangle and create a fabric that is then stretched across a canvas.

The canvases are like a Rorschach test, a psychological assessment using ambiguous inkblots to reveal a person’s thought patterns, personality and emotional state. 84 of them currently hang in the main hall of the Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile (CHAT), creating a maze of emotions and thoughts.

“We want people to feel lost in the space,” says Wang Weiwei, the chief curator of Mukazhanova’s first solo exhibition, Dowry of the Soul, which runs at CHAT until March 1. “Somehow you might feel a very heavy, very intense kind of emotion.”

Felt connections

 “You really can spend quite a lot of time in the space, because you will see each felt piece has very different details, very beautiful texture, and the sound” — a mix of field recordings, shamans praying and electronic music by Kazakh composer Samrat Irzhassov — “actually will accompany you while you are navigating the space,” says Wang.

The canvases that make up the Portrait-Reflections (on the history of my homeland, Qandy Qantar 2022) series lack any identifiable feature. They exude aura and emotion instead of form. Striking colours — lemon, coral, electric blue, fluorescent pink — “accentuate the wounds and scars of life,” according to the exhibition’s press release.

To Mukazhanova and the exhibition’s curators, a dowry goes beyond wedding gifts or bride prices. It’s about heritage — the positive and negative, along with traumas inherited from our ancestors. That includes the darker parts of a country’s history.

Mukazhanova uses textiles like silk and felt, often part of a dowry in Central Asia, as the base of her work. They’re a physical representation of the traditions and traumas passed on to her that she’s dissecting and building into something of her own. 

In her large-scale felt series Post Nomadic Reality she reinterprets the tuskyiz, a traditional embroidered wall hanging that used to be made and gifted by a woman’s mother and the older women in her family. A blessing and a form of “knowledge circulation,” they’re left unfinished at the bottom to signify life’s ongoing journey, says Wang.

“The traditional tuskyiz are always very colourful with a lot of decoration, but Gulnur actually erased this decoration,” adds Wang. “She wanted to make a very minimised gate for us to really imagine, without tradition, what kind of future are we facing? What kind of tradition do we receive and want to preserve?”

Mukazhanova is proud of the traditions of textile making in Central Asia and the talent of women in her community but is also angry about the poor conditions and unfair roles these women are consigned to in society — and that complex “love, hate” feeling is part of her dowry, says Wang.

Mukazhanova’s tuskyiz, an untitled triptych, is brightly coloured but has a minimal palette and no clear patterns or symbols. Gone are the patterns like ram’s horns, instead replaced by dreamlike arched forms that curators say in a press release “represent portals to other realms” and the “quiet corners of the mind where deep-seated memories, hopes, fantasies and desires reside.”

Wounds, scars and evolution

Mukazhanova says her work represents the evolution of nomadic culture and captures the tension between the legacies of the past and modern life. While the tuskyiz is often used as a symbolic stand-in to represent Kazakhstan in museums and restaurants, ordinary people have a distance with these objects, says Wang. They no longer make them in families. And while the wool felt was once part of daily life (yurts, the easily assembled and disassembled homes of nomads, are made of it) it’s harder to come into contact with now.

Modern Kazakhs were forced to abandon their nomadic lifestyles during the years of Soviet rule in the 20th century, when the government implemented harsh and deadly policies moving towards an agricultural society that could feed the ambitions of the USSR. The government also looked to elevate Russian culture over local traditions.

It’s this legacy that Mukazhanova is also grappling with in her work. Born in Semipalantisk, Kazakhstan in 1984, her childhood was a period of major change for the country. The Soviet Union collapsed and Kazakhstan declared independence in 1991. The country has been trying to preserve its traditions, but it has struggled.

The felt canvases reflect that struggle. Even the simple act of stretching the felt onto a canvas is a statement on transformation, both chosen and forced. “This is an important aspect to me,” she explains in a video on her website. “It’s another way to see the felt tapestries, which nowadays are no longer hung like traditional tapestries, but have been stretched and whose shape has been modified.”

Mukazhanova says felt is a “mystical media” for her. When she was studying at an art academy in Kazakhstan, it was something usual and normal, but after moving to Germany, where she has been based since studying art in Berlin, she felt there was something connected between her and the felt. 

“I feel really connected to the soul of my ancestors — with the roots and feel the very deep emotions,” she says. “So, this felt making process somehow brings me to a meditative state, and I feel in balance, comfortable in my place. Some very strong feelings, some very strong emotions, especially first with spreading the fibres on the surface, very, like, soft, then comes water, and the water brings the deepness. So again, it’s life, materials, water, and the wool during this felting, here I become, getting this energy.”

The world’s dowry

 While, on the surface, the exhibition is about Kazakhstan, Mukazhanova says her work is not just about her homeland and her journey. “I use traditional textiles and reflect on its history and society in my work. But for this exhibition, Kazakhstan is just a doorway. I want to invite people to look beyond it, to think about what’s happening in the world, and, more importantly, what’s happening within themselves,” says Mukazhanova.

There are two series in the exhibition that does this explicitly. The Shadows of Hope: Yesterday’s Past, Today’s Present, 2022 (Partial) — a large-scale collage of fabrics created during the artist’s residency at CHAT in 2022, and nine images part of Global Society where the artist invites people she meets in Central Asia and Europe to be photographed, but hides the identity of her models behind a white felt mask, modeled on her own face.

Both comment on the “flattening” nature of global culture, says Wang. Close up, visitors may recognise familiar patterns, gold dragons, multicoloured clouds and bright peonies in the collage, but they’ve been deconstructed and re-purposed to create an amorphous map. While distinctly Chinese, the fabrics are also part of Central Asian history. The silks and rayons were imported during Soviet times and became part of a woman’s dowry.

“You can see that these elements are representing a kind of cultural background, but they were all merged, joined together, transformed and created a bigger global landscape,” says Wang. With the photographs, the masks cover up the person, but the backgrounds and the patterns of their traditional dress are a clue to who they might be. It’s a commentary on how people’s identities and cultures receive global impact.

“Gulnur’s work allows us to experience the rich layers of interaction between people and textiles. Through textiles, we can study history, observe society and reflect on heritage,” says Wang. “We can also release feelings, heal emotionally and explore the self.”

For Mukazhanova, this is part of our heritage. “It’s not only about me,” she says. “It’s about all of us, all the people in the world.” Gulnur Mukazhanova: Dowry of the Soul is on show until 1 March 2026 at The Mills. Click here for more information.