The Almaty Museum of Arts (ALMA) is preparing to open the first major exhibition of video art in Kazakhstan, «Bill Viola: The Space of Time.» Kursiv LifeStyle attended a preview ahead of the public opening and explains why the exhibition is both significant and worth seeing.
The Uly Dala hall on the first floor houses the exhibition. The project has been prepared together with Bill Viola’s studio in California and is curated by Kira Perov, executive director of Bill Viola Studio, as well as the artist’s wife and longtime artistic partner.
The exhibition brings together 18 works created between 1977 and 2013 and is the first large-scale video art exhibition in Central Asia. One of Viola’s works had already been on display on the museum’s second floor.
Perov noted that Viola is considered one of the leading figures in the history of video art. Over more than 40 years, he explored themes of life and death, memory, time and human perception through moving images.
She added that the artist often wrote in his diaries that if a visitor left the museum without remembering the artist’s name or the title of a single work, but left with an emotional response and a desire to change or create something, then art had fulfilled its purpose.
Perov said that transporting the artworks to Kazakhstan was a real challenge. In addition to the videos, the team shipped special projection scrims and works personally made by Viola, including «Heaven and Earth,» which consists of two black-and-white TVs. Most of the required equipment, however, was sourced in Kazakhstan.
The museum’s founder, entrepreneur Nurlan Smagulov, said that an exhibition by a world-class artist could attract many tourists who would travel to Almaty specifically to see it.
«Several years ago, I traveled to Belgium with my family specifically to see his works. Exhibitions of Bill Viola’s work were held at some of the world’s leading museums, including Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Whitney Museum of American Art. These are world-class museums, and now the works of such an artist can be seen in Almaty,» the businessman said.
According to the organizers, it takes nearly two and a half hours to see the entire exhibition. Each work is presented on a continuous loop, with some videos lasting up to 15 minutes.
The exhibition will run from July 1, 2026, to Jan. 17, 2027. Ahead of the exhibition’s opening, an illustrated catalog in Kazakh, Russian and English featuring descriptions of the works was also released.
