Pathways to Himoya

How may we strengthen and move toward sources of protection, while living through ever widening conflict geographies, autocratic regimes, and climate catastrophe? As a cultural pursuit, Himoya is premised on this inquiry. As a linguistic notion emerging from extinct Karluk Turkic (ancestor to Uzbek, Uyghur, and Turkmen languages) moving across shared geographies, it refutes singular meaning. Instead, it produces an aural sensation of sheltering under expansive skies, a talismanic heirloom, commemoration of elders, and an open embrace. At the heart of it, Himoya seeks to act as emotional infrastructure to host sensations of grief, rage, shame, and radical love. The exhibition as place-making asks for cohabitation of living bodies and energies. And, what it means to survive with ethical substance. It draws from Madina Tlostanova’s reflection:

“Decolonial thinking is necessarily a decolonial behavior as well, a specific ethos of decoloniality. What is meant here is not an abstract declarative ethics of giving rights back to the wretched of the Earth but more importantly, a link of the ethical moment with the self-positioning of decolonial humanists.”

Artists compose oracular kinships in our midst through non-linear wayfinding. We sense their brave acts of safeguarding frayed value systems and worldliness. As guardians preserving pluralist communal memory and shaping restorative narration across fissured histories, Eurocentrism and Post-Soviet amnesia. Anchored in Kazakh cultures and nomadic habitus, this project considers regional affinities as an evolving star constellation, indexing global majority voices beyond confines of bordered territories.  

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Of grandmothers who knew 

the distance

Between their grief and their great great grandmothers’

Could by measured

In things we tip-toe around. 

• Koleka Putuma, Can I Get a Witness?, 2024

My first visit to Almaty coincided with a window of mourning the loss of my Zoroastrian grandmother. In the vivid presence of her spirit entwined with mine, I set forth in becoming acquainted with the city, its people and cultural topography. Among many encounters was a serendipitous pilgrimage with Alima Kairat to Ungurtas Mountain also referred to as ‘the navel of the earth’, where one is invited into energy structures, stony paths, and caves connecting the universal elements of Tengri (sovereign sky) and Umay (nourishing earth). A sign placed near the site entrance notifies: “According to legends, Ungurtas was chosen by Sufi dervishes as their refuge.” There, one learns how geomagnetic fields act on our somatic being as they are encouraged to move with heart rather than rational mind. Attuning to the inner pulls and outflow of masculine and feminine energies by leaning against black and red stone pillars. 

I also learned how Kazakh tradition and Tengri cosmology around family historiography trace lineage to Zheti Ata or the ‘Seven Forefathers’. Yet, through personal formation and artist conversations evolving through the course of this project, kept turning to the ways we are foremost shaped by grandmother spirits. Across Himoya, artists have led intuitive research and creative interpretation of matrilineal legacies and gender-egalitarian visions continuously framing the grandmother as primordial civic protagonist, as an intimate crossroad and protection force. I once read that maternal intergenerational continuity between three generations is determined through cellular migration and genetic bonds. 

Such seeding also occurs through storylines that live on and continue to nurture a shared course of futurity via an efflorescence of wisdoms and lessons governed by continuum. 

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A majestic display of silver amulets at the A. Kasteev Museum in Almaty led me to instantly reminisce not only the heavy silver jewelry worn by pastoralists in my home region, Gujarat in Western India but also indigenous handcrafted Sámi silver ornaments which are considered matrilineal heritage. Amulets build a map of relations and operate as navigation devices. Much of western colonial discourse and quasi-scientific racism of Soviet ideology have feared and destroyed ornamentation especially because of its cleansing and spiritual potency. As ritual objects worn on the body, these become somatic extensions that block, guide and absorb vibrations—activated against evil eye, disease, and worn especially during journeys away from home. As self and collective fashioning of the corporeal, especially within nomadic cultures, routes of exile and trade, these mobile icons are identity markers linking territories and atmospheres of the environs of movement. Talismans and silver perfume bottles have been worn around the neck, chest, hair, and back by peoples of the Steppe for centuries. Often gifted as child bearing and dowry gifts in South Asia; yet during times of war and famine, women have drawn strength from and sacrificed these prized possessions in exchange for clan security and safe passage. Between 1980s and early 2000s, Tamils in Northern Sri Lanka had to bury precious belongings underground while fleeing military attacks and a threatened homeland during a civil war. In Himoya, several artists shape talismanic forms as devotional technologies, a coded language of belonging and lexicon of femme prowess. 

The bozuband, a cylindrical amulet case in Central Asia is an example of popular and sacred affinities across geographies. Worn as amulets well into the nineteenth century especially in Uzbekistan, often bearing a medallion made of carnelian with calligraphic inscriptions created by Indian and Iranian jewellers. Similarly, silver tumar (amulet cases) carry Arabic prayers written especially for the wearer but also could also include objects such as medicinal herbs, animal fur, hair, coins or salt. Especially in the pre-Islamic period, in case of illness they were often used for healing. The amulet thus becomes another symbolic realm guiding the philosophy of such an exhibition, more so given the arc of grief, mass displacement and annihilation that is being endured in our midst as a world civilisation.

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At the Kazakh Museum of Folk Instruments, we meet musical instruments as cultural repositories of timekeeping. As archival indexes spanning ancient legends to contemporary historical events and political genealogy retained through performer-historians. Of particular interest for me is the Qyl-qobyz associated with a vast ecology of lyrical ideas and landscapes connected to shamanic ritual and healing protocols led by baqsy. Poet-curator Anuar Duisenbinov, helped me understand that each qobyz displayed there is associated with a repository of practice and lineage, equally bearing a unique embodied temperament and body characteristics. These include the Kazakh language terms bas

(head) or scroll, moiyn (neck), keude (chest) or main body, qulaqtar (ears)

or tuning pegs, and ishekter (intestines) or strings. I was particularly fascinated by the embellishments that these sonic entities carry; for instance, tiny mirrors constructed to repel the evil eye or sinister forces as well as ‘earrings’ dangling from the bowl-like spaces which lend a percussive timbre to the qyl-qobyz. 

That evening revered performer and scholar Raushan Orazbayeva took the stage at the Tselinny Center as part of Rites of Eternal Wind, the second edition of Korkut Sonic Arts Triennale. Mere minutes prior to the recital there had been a sudden downpour, as though a cleansing ritual had commenced, and we were being prepared for her arrival. Saida Daukeyeva addresses “the instrument as sentient being”, reminding us of its origins in immortality, and how harmonics of the qobyz navigate upper and lower worlds. When embarking on her recital, Orazbayeva instructed us to listen with surrender as the resonances would clean our ears and continue to do this work over weeks to come. These synergies were experienced through the vibrato and overtones which lend instrumentation an embodied voice while its pulsating pitch unleashes contrasting environments. An acoustic sobbing emerges as if a lament being woven for a world in ruin and toward the preserve of ancestral lifeways. Receiving this sonic remedy acquired a weight I had not anticipated, traveling from the inner ear into the spine—attuning with minutely altered physical and emotive states.

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I need to know their names 

those women I would have walked with 

jauntily the way men go in groups 

swinging their arms

• Lucille Clifton, the lost women, 1989 

For years I have been studying goddess iconography, especially boundary-crossing renditions of the divine and wild feminine, as more-than-human and gender fluid entities. Sacred forms that refute clichés as well as simplistic dichotomies of nature and nurture, where ferocity is channeled alongside benevolence; Deities of clans and villages, of learning and war, of shamans and widows. As a sheltering medium of transfiguration, such divinities summon and accompany the voyage into trails of bold truth—crossing thresholds of different life seasons, and uplift when in the grip of vulnerability, loss, and fear. Through artist dialogues in preparing for this project there have been different femme personas appearing in the guise of empowered nurturing and ‘monstrous’ beings emergent across folk tales, popular Steppe mythologies, and pre-Islamic cosmologies. Among these are Zhalmauyz Kempir and Al Kardai. While such characters reflect dual traits and are symbolised to terrify subjects absorbed in maintaining societal status quo, in essence they represent a vital refusal of normative gender roles and patriarchal domination. Their targeted malignancy is therefore rooted in narrations that become canonised to suppress transgressive women protagonists of history and social milieu. In their expulsion and repulsion is a galvanising power to birth brave, liberatory and boundary-crossing realities. In many stories accompanying sacred icons there is a struggle between civilisation and the natural world, wherein the elements such as wind and water acquire a potency for mutation, blessing or curse, traversing from one paradigm into another. Over time, rehearsals of faith give way for cultural mutation, shifting belief systems, and animate past versions as altered avatars. At times one visits a shrine, not knowing which version of the goddess will be waiting for an encounter, and whether she has already been cannibalised by patriarchal establishments that encroach our prayer and colonise our imagination. 

The wild feminine thus endures as bodily and ritualistic excess, disobeying limits and violent policing. Rather than “bargaining with patriarchy” she pursues an inheritance of knowledge with economic and spiritual mutuality. Across various creative lexicons in Himoya, matriarchy is approached as metabolic staging ground of liberatory strategies and story worlds that challenge the paternalistic nation-state, colonial erasure, and subjugation of minority lives. Historically and today, the severe impact of patriarchal power is evident across Central Asia through dominant structures of enforcement, private ownership, neo-imperialism, Uyat (cultures of shame and shaming) and gendered violation. 

Zarina Mukanova notes, “The Kazakh tradition holds that daughters belong to an alien group of people, as indicated by the saying ‘qyz zhat zhurt’ (daughter belongs to alien). When a daughter is born, she is immediately prepared for marriage and educated to take on responsibilities with her husband’s family and ruw (geneology).” In contrast, drawing from the Greek meaning of ‘arché’, matriarchy conjures ‘the mothers from the beginning.’ This attends not only to the biological conditions that through giving birth, mothers engender the beginning of life, but also to the cultural fact that they created the beginnings of culture itself. It is this circulation of social meaning, embodied substance, political agency, and narrative signs that Himoya aligns with, to explore passages into maternal kinships, matri-locality as an expanded notion of home and exile, and matrilineal legacies as a universally inflected antidote to patriarchal spheres of life. 

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