Across multiple linguistic traditions, Himoya evokes protection, shelter, guardianship, and the defence of vulnerability. Reading this notion anew, the exhibition, its embodied research, workshops and learning programme attune to oracular knowledge systems and ancestral intelligence as constellations inherent to cultural production and artmaking today. Himoya charts intersecting paths that renew artistic relations with matrilineal energies, anti-imperial cosmologies and environmental custodianship while navigating colonial tensions, ideological erasures, and civic repression evidenced in epic losses of languages, rites, and localized ways of life. 20 artists actively involved with these areas participate with newly commissioned projects, site-responsive and existing works.  

The exhibition unfolds through a constellation of artistic positions that centre femme and queer kinships, sufi and zoroastrian practices, shamanic traditions, ecological stewardship, and anti-imperial modes of imagining common futures. Drawing inspiration from Tengri living traditions, ancient Turkic cosmologies, and diverse spiritual practices across geographies, Himoya considers how art can function as an oracular and protective force in a time marked by patriarchal violence, political volatility, ecological ruination and renewed struggles over memory and belonging.

Through sculpture, moving image, installation, painting, textile, performance, and sound, the participating artists engage questions of shame, migration, historical traumadreaming, societal transformation, and collective survival. Together, they propose alternative forms of relation rooted in reciprocity, devotional protocols, reparative justice, and matriarchal memory.

Alima Kairat, artistic director at Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture notes:
‘For Tselinny, Himoya is the culmination of a conversation that began in 2021—a slow unfolding of questions around matrilineal memory, ritual, protection, and the inherited languages of shame and care. These themes are deeply rooted in the lived realities of Kazakhstan and Central Asia, where ancestral knowledge continues to shape the present and offers new ways of imagining the future.’

The exhibition design by Diogo Passarinho Studio (Team: Diogo Passarinho and Gonçalo Reynolds) corresponds with the building’s history as a Soviet period cinema reimagined as a realm of non-imperial projection, convivial habitation, and expansive dreaming – adding disparate material contours that lend a generative topography and connective tissue across the ‘Orta’ (exhibition sites). Himoya contributes a social tapestry of narratives and circulation of embodied knowledge forms within the ‘cloud-like’ architecture. 

Participating artists: Ahmed Umar, Almagul Menlibayeva, Ana María Millán, Areez Katki, Aziza Kadyri, Citra Sasmita, Guzel Zakir, Haegue Yang, Hoa Dung Clerget, Jazgul Madazimova, Nara Beibit, NAOMI, Oyjon Khayrullayeva, Radina Yasueva, Rajni Perera, Rithika Pandey, Thania Petersen, Umida Akhmedova, Yelaman Muqtarkhan, Zilola Saidova

Natasha Ginwala is a curator, researcher and writer. Since 2022, she is a member of the Advisory Board of Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture. Ginwala is artistic director of Colomboscope in Sri Lanka and curator of Current V: Ancestral Ocean at TBA21—Academy (2026-08). She previously served as Associate Curator at Large at Gropius Bau, Berlin (2018-2024) and was also co-artistic director of the 13th Gwangju Biennale (2021). She was part of curatorial teams of Sharjah Biennial 16 (2025), Contour Biennale 8, documenta 14 (2017), 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2014), Taipei Biennale 2012, and has led several international exhibitions, forums, educational programmes since 2011. Ginwala is a widely published author on contemporary art, visual culture, decolonial thought and social justice. 

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