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 Şeki 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
Motif
Shyrdak — Kazakh steppe geometry
Kazakhstan · felt carpet · nomadic tradition
How a collaboration works
Each artist here drew a pattern, and a master in Şəki turned it into cloth. Those are two separate skills and neither one substitutes for the other: the drawing decides what the piece says, and the block-cutting and dyeing decide whether silk can be made to say it.
The artists were not asked to imitate Azerbaijani ornament. They were asked for their own — shibori from Japan, adire from Nigeria, the block-printed vocabulary of Rajasthan, the wool figures of a Kyrgyz shyrdak — and then that drawing had to survive being cut into pear wood and held under hot wax. What comes back is neither the artist’s tradition nor Şəki’s. It is the argument between them.
The signature
Every artist page carries a signature, and every piece is published under the name of the person who drew it rather than under a house style. That is deliberate. A kelaghayi is anonymous work by tradition — the stamps in Basqal have outlived the names of everyone who cut them — and putting a name back on the cloth is the one thing Navohi does that the tradition does not.
Some artists have a full collection here. Some have a single concept piece that was never made. Both are on the page, because the record of what was proposed is part of the record of what exists.
Reading the pattern
The ornament is not decoration that happened to settle on the cloth. Each motif carries information, and the literature of the craft calls the whole system a book of life for anyone who can read its signs. Borders and centre take different stamps: pomegranate flower, crescent, grapevine and sun around the edge; small flowers, coins, quince flower, gazelle eyes, cat’s paw and leaf across the field. Plant motifs run to rose, narcissus, carnation, poppy, lily and iris, and they are set against straight and broken lines, zigzags, rhombuses and stars.
Colour is read the same way. Blue, red and ochre gold are the healing colours, credited with turning away the evil eye. Age and standing govern what is worn: dark, quiet tones and sparse ornament for an older woman; bright colour for a young one, who by tradition would not put on a black kelaghayi even at a funeral. The seven-colour work — red, blue, yellow, green, white, pink and dark brown on a single cloth — is held to be the ceiling of the craft.