Balnura Nussipova is an Almaty-based working across photography, video, and installation. Her practice engages with memory, migration, decoloniality, and social transformation, exploring how memory manifests itself in everyday life—through gestures, objects, family histories, and collective habits. Her works often become spaces where personal experience intersects with collective memory, allowing the past to continue speaking through the present.

Created specifically for the exhibition, “1000 Little Things” invites viewers to reflect on the history of independent Kazakhstan through the story of a single banknote—the 1,000 tenge note. Over the decades, its design has changed, reflecting shifting political eras, state ambitions, and visions of the future. Alongside these transformations, the purchasing power of the currency has also changed, revealing broader shifts in everyday life.

At the centre of the photographic series is the dastarkhan, the traditional table laid out for a shared meal. Nussipova recreates the same family table across different years of Kazakhstan's independence, filling it only with the goods that could be purchased for 1,000 tenge at each moment in time. The table becomes a timeline through which changing prices reveal deeper social processes: inflation, growing inequality, the erosion of stability, and changing ideas of prosperity.

“1000 Little Things” is not only a story about money but also an intimate account of shared hopes and lived experiences. Through the most ordinary things — bread, tea, sweets, empty plates, and familiar family gestures — the work reflects on how economic forces become part of personal biographies, and how profound national transformations leave their mark on the domestic sphere and around the shared table.

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