Kazakhstan
Hello, I'm Aizat
Bekova
My practice is rooted in the shyrdak tradition of Kazakh felt — the geometric vocabulary of the steppe. Silk gives those patterns a different kind of freedom.
Aizat Bekova is an Almaty-based artist whose designs bridge the nomadic traditions of the Kazakh steppe with a contemporary minimalist sensibility. Drawing from the geometric language of shyrdak felt carpets and the vast open skies of Central Asia, her compositions carry a rare sense of space and freedom.
On the steppe, you learn to read patterns in everything. The way grass bends before wind. The geometry of a hawk circling. My ancestors encoded this reading into felt — interlocking shapes that describe mountains, rivers, sky, without ever depicting them directly. I spent six months translating shyrdak geometry into a flat image that could be pressed from a wooden stamp. It was harder than I expected. Felt patterns are three-dimensional — they are sewn, not printed. The logic of the needle is different from the logic of the galib. I finally got it by working backwards. I took photographs of my grandmother’s shyrdak — the one she made for my mother’s wedding — and traced just the edges of the colour fields. Those edges, flattened onto wood, became my stamp. When Narmin presses that stamp into Shaki silk with her pomegranate dye, the steppe will have travelled further from home than any Kazakh nomad ever did. I think my grandmother would find that funny. I find it necessary.
— Aizat Bekova, Almaty, Kazakhstan
The motif
Shyrdak — Kazakh steppe geometry
Kazakhstan · felt carpet · nomadic tradition
The Steppe Collection
The Steppe Collection
Shyrdak-inspired motifs on silk · 20 pieces
20 pieces
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