The opening of the Almaty Museum of Arts signals a turning point for Kazakhstan’s cultural ambitions. Photo: Alexey Poptsov

Like dervishes, dancers turned in circles in their white and rainbow kimonos in the hall of the Almaty Museum of Arts during a performance by Greek artist Nefeli Papadimouli. They were creating space amongst the crowd that receded more and more towards the walls of the building. Two British businesspeople behind me continued to network while the sleeves of the dervishes missed them by just a few centimeters. It was the night of the museum’s opening, and, as surreal as it was, these two people’s intense chatting about investments and deals, as if nothing was happening around them, is not surprising for Kazakhstan. We are in a country known for cars, natural resources and wealth generated through oil exports, and many people here—expats and locals alike—have habits that are hard to break.

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Asking someone to put aside industry to appreciate art is a tough sell, though that’s likely to change with the recent openings, just a few days apart, of the Almaty Museum and the Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture. Together they mark the beginning of a new phase for Kazakhstan, and its epicenter is the country’s historical cultural capital versus the more business-oriented Astana.

A city of contradictions, Almaty is very green and has many parks but is also plagued by traffic, resulting in it being one of the 25 most polluted cities in the world. The city center has a number of Soviet buildings and decorations that speak to its past—especially to space exploration—but those have been carelessly swallowed by KFC, Starbucks and Burger King. Here, the communist past and consumerist present conflate, and these juxtapositions are reminders that the recent history of Kazakhstan is anything but easy. The large former USSR state was originally composed of nomadic populations coming from Central Asia, and today there is a Muslim-majority population that speaks both Russian and Kazakh, a language once seen as inferior by the Russians, who tried for years to suppress it.

Many of its contemporary artists explore what it means to decolonize from Russia, rebelling against a form of orientalism that differs from that practiced by Western colonial powers. Among them is

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