Inga Lāce

From Qonaqtar to Community: Building Publics Through Art in Central Asia

Inga Lāce

Curator, Almaty Museum of Arts, Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Almaty Museum of Arts is the first private museum of modern and contemporary art in Central Asia, opened in September 2025. In this presentation, curator Inga Lāce reflects on Qonaqtar (“Guests”), the museum’s inaugural collection exhibition, and the public program developed around it during the institution’s first year. Drawing on artworks from the twentieth century to the present, Qonaqtar explored hospitality, migration, belonging, and cultural exchange as key themes shaping the histories of Kazakhstan and Central Asia.

The talk examines how public programming can become a curatorial tool for building relationships between museums and their audiences. Through co-hosting programs with alternative schools, community groups, activists, and researchers, the program expanded beyond the gallery space and created opportunities for conversation. From discussions on food, music, diaspora, and the anti-nuclear movement to workshops centered on local crafts, the museum sought to engage diverse publics through multiple forms of exchange.

Drawing on local traditions of hospitality, collective learning, and craft-based knowledge, the programs surrounding Qonaqtar repositioned visitors as active participants in the production of new meanings, demonstrating how public programming can function as a transformative curatorial methodology that contributes to institution-building, community engagement, and the creation of new cultural publics.

Biography:

Inga Lāce is a curator from Riga, Latvia. Since 2023, she has been working at the Almaty Museum of Arts in Kazakhstan, where she organized its inaugural collection show, Qonaqtar; a collaborative gathering with Tate Modern A history in acts and gestures: Performance, Central Asia and the Caucasus; and a program on Central Asian women artists in partnership with AWARE. She has started a research project on rethinking Central Asian art histories in collaboration with New York University, supported by Getty.

Previously, she was a C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow at MoMA, New York (2020–23) and a curator at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (2012–20). In 2023, she co-curated New Visions – The Henie Onstad Triennial for Photography and New Media in Oslo, as well as the Kaunas Biennial, the contemporary art festival Survival Kit 14, and the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts. She is also the co-curator (with Adomas Narkevičius) of the Latvian Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, featuring artists MAREUNROL'S and Bruno Birmanis.