Inga Lāce

Inga Lāce is curator from Riga, Latvia, currently working at the Almaty Museum of Arts, Kazakhstan. She was C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow at MoMA, New York (2020–2023) and has been a curator at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (2012–2020). 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 curator of the current Latvian Pavilion at the 61st Biennale di Venezia with artists MAREUNROL'S and Bruno Birmanis (co-curated with Adomas Narkevičius).

From Qonaqtar to Community: Curatorial Learning and Building Publics in Central Asia

Almaty Museum of Arts, 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 programme developed around it during the institution’s first year. Bringing together artworks from the twentieth century to the present, Qonaqtar explored hospitality, migration, belonging, and cultural exchange as forces shaping the histories of Kazakhstan and Central Asia.

Taking the exhibition and its public programme as a case study, the presentation considers curatorial learning as something that takes place not only through formal education or established professional structures, but through encounters between institutions, artworks, communities, and different forms of knowledge. Programmes co-hosted with alternative schools, community groups, activists, artists, and researchers addressed subjects ranging from food, music, diaspora, and the anti-nuclear movement to local craft traditions.

Drawing on practices of hospitality, collective learning, oral histories, and craft-based knowledge, these encounters brought perspectives into the museum that were not necessarily contained within its collection or curatorial expertise. The presentation asks how public programming can become a reciprocal form of curatorial learning and knowledge production: a methodology through which a new institution learns from its publics, develops new forms of curatorial research, and simultaneously participates in the creation of new cultural publics.