Days after her 80th birthday, Kazakhstani artist Batima Zaurbekova opened the most comprehensive survey of her career at the Abylkhan Kasteyev National Museum of Arts in Almaty. Titled Threads of Heritage, the exhibition runs from September 25 to November 8 and brings together more than 80 tapestries, paintings and sketches spanning six decades of work.

Zaurbekova was the first woman to join Kazakhstan's emerging tapestry school in the 1960s and 1970s, a notable achievement in a field where patriarchal norms persisted despite formal Soviet commitments to equality. Born in 1946 to a carpet artisan mother and a jeweller uncle, she trained in painting at the Alma-Ata Art School before specialising in applied arts, and was mentored by figures from the Almaty school founded by artists who had fled Stalin-era repression.

The exhibition's centrepiece is Vastness, a tapestry from 1975 measuring more than two by three and a half metres, which took roughly six months to weave. Its swirling composition of a stylised yurt and female figure amid musicians, plants and animals presents an idealised vision of the world before rupture, while other large works from the same period, including Kazakhstan and Mother Earth, blend human figures with mountains, water and light in semi-abstract arrangements. The artist regards Mother Earth as among her most technically demanding pieces.

Later sections follow her through the collapse of the Soviet Union, a period when state commissions vanished and she spent several years in Turkey, and into the 2000s, when she painted Almaty and Astana during their post-independence building booms. Her skyscrapers rise in bright, muscular prisms of colour, as if reaching sunward. Now an Honoured Worker of Culture and a recipient of the Order of Otan, Zaurbekova is presented as a bridge between Kazakhstan's textile traditions and its fast-changing contemporary scene, just as new Almaty institutions open around her.