Batima Zaurbekova is among Kazakhstan's most celebrated artists, yet outside her homeland her name is barely known. A landmark retrospective at Almaty's Abylkhan Kasteyev National Museum of Arts aims to change that. 'Threads of Heritage', marking the artist's 80th birthday, brings together more than 80 works — mostly tapestries, with paintings and drawings alongside — and runs through 9 November.

Zaurbekova was pivotal in building Kazakhstan's national school of tapestry. Born in 1946 in the Zhambyl region, she learned needlework from her mother, a seamstress, and graduated from Almaty's art college in 1969, choosing the then-new medium of tapestry over painting. Working on a vertical loom, her pieces are painstakingly slow to make, yet she has produced hundreds. She won the Shokan Valikhanov State Prize in 1980 and was named an Honored Worker of Culture in 2004; the Kasteyev holds 18 of her pieces as part of the national cultural legacy.

The show reads her work through two lenses at once: Kazakh themes and motifs, and the ideas of Western Modernism. Wall texts compare her approach to Paul Klee's belief that nature guides form, and to the philosophies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Franz Marc, while Zaurbekova herself describes the work simply as traditional, national — 'a work from Kazakhstan', reinterpreted in a modern context. The September opening drew the country's cultural and political elite, including culture minister Arman Kyrybayev.

For the first 25 years of her practice she executed every part of each tapestry herself, until her eyesight forced a change; now she draws and paints, designing gridded patterns that assistants help her realise. Her latest piece, Transitional Season (2026), made from felt and appliqué over two months, is a new departure. At 80, she says her spring of creativity is not dry after all — and the show makes a case, like those for Olga de Amaral and Gego before her, that a pioneer celebrated at home deserves a wider audience abroad.