Keynote · Kazakhstan at 35
Under the
Eternal Blue Sky
Aiganym Gali
Photo: Nikolai Postnikov
One word holds the oldest idea of the steppe. Aiganym Gali tells it in three stories: how her ancestors found it, how a century nearly erased it, and how she found it again on her knees before a canvas.
The keynote as delivered · Royal Society for Asian Affairs · King’s College London · 4 November 2026
Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen: the Royal Society for Asian Affairs was founded 125 years ago as the Central Asian Society. My country gained independence 35 years ago. So this morning a very old curiosity meets a very young state. I would like to show you something older than both.
This morning I want to share one idea with you, and it is one word: Tengri. It is the oldest name for God on the steppe, and it means “the great blue sky”. Inside that word is an idea that took Europe two thousand years and a revolution in physics to come close to: that God is beyond everything and inside everything, at the same time.
I will tell you about Tengri in three stories. A story of my ancestors, who perceived this idea under the open sky. A story of the twentieth century, when we nearly lost it. And my own story: how I found it again, as an artist, on my knees in front of a canvas.
Let me also be clear about who is speaking. I am not a historian, and I am not a theologian. I come to you as an artist from Kazakhstan, and as someone who lives this tradition rather than only studies it. I have given my whole life to painting, and I practise it almost as a discipline of prayer. And for just as long I have read the sacred texts of many beliefs, looking for the one thread that unites them all. When I quote old texts or scholars, I will say so. Everything else is my own experience.
So before I say anything more, I would like you to hear the steppe.
The hall listens to Adai, a kui for the dombra.
Adai Riders in the morning mist. Photo: Nikolai Postnikov
That was Adai, a kui: a piece for the dombra, our two-stringed lute, with no words, only the story told by the strings. It was written in the nineteenth century by Kurmangazy, our greatest composer. If you heard horses galloping across open land, you heard it right. It carries the name of my people, the Adai, a tribe of warrior horsemen from the far west of Kazakhstan, from the land between the Caspian Sea and the white cliffs of Mangystau.
The year is 2007. I step down from the film crew’s wagon. I am there to play a role in a film, and for forty days I will be cut off from the noise of the city. I grew up in Almaty, between the Celestial Mountains of the Tian Shan, crowned by Khan Tengri, and the steppe. And yet this is the first time I stand face to face with my land, alone.
Something happens in that moment. I cannot move. The only movement is my blinking. And each time I blink, the land is a different picture.
Silver. Then green.
Then blue. Then pink.
Mangystau, western Kazakhstan. Photo: Isabella Tabacchi
It is not a hallucination. It is something you can experience only at sea, or in its opposite, the steppe, which was once the bottom of a sea. It is the sky, the great Tengri, reflected on the face of Mother Earth, Umai. A cloud moves, the air changes, and the whole land changes colour, and you watch it through the tiny pupils of your human eyes.
I did not understand that moment. I was too young. A few weeks later I left for London, and I never really came back, except for short visits. I have spent most of my life far away from that land. And perhaps that is exactly why I can see it so vividly.
So let me begin where my ancestors began: under the open blue sky.
—— Story one ——
Finding Tengri
Imagine a sea of grass eight thousand kilometres long, from Hungary to Manchuria: the Great Steppe. Its nomads, from the Turks to the Mongols, prayed to one sky, Tengri.
Its cradle was the Altai, where, the story goes, a she-wolf saved a wounded boy and bore him ten sons. One of them, Ashina, founded the line of the Turkic khans, rulers of the steppe, who rode under a golden wolf’s head. We are the children of that wolf mother. And at the heart of this steppe lies Kazakhstan.
When you stand in the steppe, you have nowhere to hide. No forest, no wall, no city between you and the horizon. Your body suddenly finds its true proportion: very small. And at the same time, something inside you becomes very large. You suddenly know your true place in the miracle.
People who live like this do not build temples. They move with the herds and the seasons, and they carry their world with them. And above them, wherever they go, one thing never changes. The infinite sky.
Who were they? Not one people, but layers. More than five thousand years ago, at Botai in the north of my country, people were already riding horses and milking them.
In the Bronze Age came herders who spoke an early relative of Sanskrit, the language of the Vedas. At Tamgaly, near Almaty, they carved people whose heads are suns. Three thousand years ago, someone on my steppe was already drawing the light.
The Golden Man of Issyk Reconstruction of the Saka warrior’s dress of gold plaques, found near Almaty in 1969. Photo: eggry, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
After them came the Saka, the people the Greeks called Scythians. They buried their chiefs in great kurgans and dressed them in gold. In 1969, near Almaty, archaeologists opened one of those kurgans and found a young warrior dressed in four thousand golden plaques, with a tall pointed cap. We call him the Golden Man. Now he stands on top of the monument of independence.
I have a personal reason to love him. My family had a dacha, a small country house, near those very kurgans, and as a child I played on them. To me they were just green hills to run up and roll down. Only much later did I understand that I had been playing on the graves of kings, and that the past I was looking for in books had been under my feet all along.
The name itself, Tengri, appears in Chinese chronicles about two hundred years before Christ. In the eighth century the Turks carved their own words in stone, in their own runic script: “When the blue sky above and the dark earth below were made, human beings were made between them.”
In 921 an Arab envoy, Ibn Fadlan, crossed the steppe and heard the nomads say Bir Tengri: one God. In 1254 a Flemish monk, William of Rubruck, stood before the Mongol emperor Möngke, who told him: “We believe there is only one God, by whom we live and by whom we die.”
“But as God gave the hand several fingers, so He has given people several ways to know him.”
Möngke Khan to William of Rubruck, 1254
And yet, in most European books, this faith is filed under one word: pagan. The travellers had two boxes: the religions of the Book, and the pagans. The nomads had no book, no prophet, no temple and no priest, so into the second box they went. No one stopped to ask what the nomads actually knew.
So let me tell you.
Here is the heart of it. European thought usually offers two ways to think about God. Either God is outside the world, its maker, looking at it from above, like a potter looking at a pot. Or God simply is the world, and nothing more.
Tengri is neither. Tengri is beyond everything, and inside everything, at the same time. Transcendent and immanent at once. The world is not made by Tengri, like a pot by a potter. The world is Tengri, experiencing itself. As the pot and the potter, as the furnace and as the studio where it all happens. As the sky and as the grass. As the wolf and as the lamb. As me, standing here and speaking, and as you, sitting there and listening. The Kazakh scholar Zira Naurzbay says it in four words: “And God became the world.”
I was taught it like this. Tengri is kök, blue, and becomes the breath, the soul. Umai is sary, yellow, and becomes the body, in all the shades of the soil. Blue and yellow mix, and give the green of nature: life. They are not two opposing things, spirit against matter. They are two colours of one light. At death the body returns to Mother Earth and the breath to Father Tengri, and nothing is lost, because nothing ever left.
It all happens
within Tengri.
Photo: Nikolai Postnikov
And this changes everything. If everything is Tengri, there is no one to stand against. The sacred and the everyday, the spirit and the body, people and nature, God and the world: they are not opposites, they are one thing experiencing itself. Even a stranger, even an enemy, is Tengri, looking at itself through other eyes. In Europe, philosophers call this panentheism; in India, Advaita, non-duality. My ancestors never needed a word for it. They simply lived it.
When Islam came to the steppe, it did not have to fight Tengri. It came through the Sufis, through Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, who sang Islam to the nomads in Turkic verse, through the heart rather than the law. The Qur’an says that God is nearer to us than our jugular vein. The steppe had always said that the sky is also inside you. A Kazakh can say Tengri, Kudai and Allah in one breath. Not conflict. Layers.
—— Story two ——
Forgetting the Name
And now the part that is hard to say.
The Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov told an old steppe legend about captives whose memory was destroyed, so that they became obedient slaves. Such a slave was called a mankurt. A mother finds her son, now a mankurt, and begs him to remember his name. He does not recognise her. On his master’s order, he kills her. As she falls, her white headscarf becomes a white bird, which still flies over the steppe, crying:
“Whose son are you?
Remember your name!”
From the legend of the mankurt, as told by Chingiz Aitmatov
I have to be honest with you. In the twentieth century, we became, in part, mankurts.
Between 1930 and 1933, the nomads were forced to settle and their herds were taken. In the famine that followed, the Asharshylyk, between one and a half and two million people died: around four in every ten Kazakhs. Up to a million more fled across the borders. For half a century it was forbidden even to speak of it. In 1937 and 1938, the Alash intellectuals, the generation that had begun to write our history in our own language, were shot as “enemies of the people”. Our alphabet was changed twice in eleven years. By 1959 Kazakhs were less than a third of the people of their own republic. And from 1949 to 1989, more than four hundred and fifty nuclear explosions were sent up into the great blue sky above our steppe, at Semipalatinsk.
—— Story three ——
Finding It Again
My grandfather was an artist. He had been exiled from the Caucasus to Kazakhstan, and there he worked as a graphic artist on geological expeditions, drawing the steppe. So long before I was born, someone in my family was already trying to put this land on paper. I spent hours with him, talking and watching, and I think he passed me the magic. When I was very small I told my mother, “Mama, I am an artist.” And she said: “Oh no. What a bad idea. You will be an outsider. It is a very hard life.”
I was perplexed; I didn’t see any separation between me and the painting. It was not a choice for me. My mother became my greatest supporter.
I didn’t have the word Tengri then. I grew up in Soviet times, when every religion was pushed aside and replaced by one official belief. My family came from different faiths, my mother’s side Orthodox Christian, my father’s side Muslim, but in those years almost everything had been forgotten. My great-great-grandfather was a Sufi sheikh, persecuted by the Soviets; one day he simply disappeared, and we never learned where. Many families from our part of the world carry a story like that. And yet I always felt God, ever since I can remember. My mother still jokes that she learned about God from her daughter.
I was fascinated by all the old stories, but never by the institutions, and I never wanted to choose. If anything, I felt closest to the Sufis, to their love of God through music, dance and experience. Perhaps that is in my blood. So when, much later, I began to read about Tengri, it was a huge relief. I didn’t need to choose who I was. I just was. It was exactly what I had always felt. I am Tengri, and Tengri is me. I am the world, and the world is me.
I won’t pretend I live in that state all the time. I would be an enlightened person, and I am not, not yet. There are moments, and they come more and more, when there is simply no distance. In nature it happens immediately. And it happens in my studio.
The studio Aiganym Gali at work, kneeling over an unstretched canvas on the floor
At art school I was taught to break that feeling, to make art from the head. Then, at sixteen, I met a teacher in Almaty, a great Kazakh master, who worked in a completely different way. He taught me to plug in, as he put it, and to receive the work rather than invent it. My skill comes from him. A few years later I became the youngest artist ever to be shown at the national museum of art in Almaty.
And then, London. I came here in 2007, straight after that film in the steppe. London was hard for me. The grey. No horizon. No wild nature. I was ill for long periods. I missed my land. Not my country: my land.
Many things come to me in dreams. One night I dreamed I walked into a large white space, and on its walls were paintings of that moment in the steppe: just light and colour. And I understood it as a challenge. You saw it. Now paint it.
For a year, I couldn’t find the technique. Everything came out too heavy, too thick. I didn’t know how to put this ever-changing moving light onto a flat white canvas.
Ainalaiyn Steppe. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 220 × 140 cm. Collection of the Marquess and Marchioness of Northampton
Aral I Steppe, 2015. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 200 × 200 cm
And then, one day, it came. I stood in front of the painting and I saw that something had ended: the stage of self-expression. I looked at the canvas and I could not find myself in it. There was no me in the painting. It took me time to understand what had happened. I had become a channel.
I worked on the floor, kneeling in front of huge canvases, for seven, eight, sometimes twelve hours, without food and without water. Not as a rule; I simply didn’t want to be interrupted by my own body. Before I go into the studio, I close every practical question, because once I am in, I am not available to anyone. Without meaning to, I had built a monastery. I became a monk within the walls of my studio, while raising two children. My family made it possible, and in a way we do this work together.
After many years on my knees, one day I asked myself: why am I still kneeling? And I stood up. I think those years of kneeling were needed. The ego had to bow, before I was allowed to stand as an instrument.
My studio is clean like a lab. Everything is in its place. I prepare it the way you prepare an altar. I come in empty, and I leave empty. And if I ever try to add something of my own, something clever, something “Aiganym”, the painting brings me back to that spot, and asks me to remove it.
People often ask me where I get my inspiration. I struggle with the word. Inspiration means something coming into you from outside.
“If everything is Tengri, there is no outside.”
I have never felt outside of that embrace. For me, the only question is whether I am clear enough, physically and in my mind, to let it pass through me. So I try to keep the channel clean. I don’t drink alcohol, I am vegetarian, I live simply. I see myself as a postwoman. The message is not mine. My work is to put it in the right envelope, put a stamp on it, and send it to the person it was written for, which is all of us.
Then came another dream. I dreamed that I was the colour orange. Not looking at orange: being it, in all its shades, its tones changing, like fire but not fire. There was no “me” any more. Not even the word. I was light. Orange light. Material and immaterial at the same time.
Photo: Nikolai Postnikov
I woke up and said to my husband: “Something new is coming. I don’t know what it is.”
A few days later I laid out a canvas to paint the steppe, as I always did. And I had a sudden, absolute urge to get a ruler. I had never used a ruler in my work. I didn’t own one. I had to go out and buy one.
I came back, I found the central line of the canvas, the line of symmetry, and I began to compose something I had never composed before. And it was completely clear to me what was happening. Tengri was asking to be put into precise geometry.
Alakai From Tengri. Star Seeds. 160 × 130 cm
It came very fast, and very precisely. In 2021 I showed the first Tengri. Light Works in London, and that same year one of them hung at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. These paintings ask almost nothing of me except my hands.
And here is the strangest part. People look at them and see the Vedas, Zoroastrian fire, Sufi stars, Islamic geometry, the ancient sacred diagrams that map the architecture of creation.
I had read the philosophies for years, but I had never studied their symbols. I learn about them from my paintings. At every exhibition, someone stands in front of a painting and quietly cries. Not from sadness. I think they are simply touched by something larger than their day.
I am not the first to work like this, and I find that comforting. In Sweden, more than a hundred years ago, the painter Hilma af Klint made some of the first abstract paintings in Europe. She wrote: “The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings, and with great force.” And: “I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict.”
And physics, too, has walked in this direction. For classical logic, something cannot be both inside and outside, both one and many. Then, a hundred years ago, light turned out to be both a wave and a particle, depending on how we look. Particles once joined behave as one system, however far apart. The observer can no longer be fully separated from what is observed. When Niels Bohr, one of the fathers of quantum theory, received Denmark’s highest honour, he chose for his coat of arms an ancient Asian symbol, the yin and yang, with the motto Contraria sunt complementa: opposites are complementary. And Carl Sagan, looking at the stars, said: “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
I am not saying my ancestors knew quantum physics. I am saying that the steppe had been living inside that paradox for three thousand years. One reality, no opposites, and every one of us a way in which it looks at itself.
It all happens within Tengri.
This is why I believe that, of everything we have, art is the strongest spiritual instrument, and perhaps the only one that can never be taken away. On the steppe we always knew it. We called our music, the kui, “the whisper of Tengri”. Our poets improvised in the aitys, letting the words come through them in front of everyone.
—— Close ——
It All Happens
Within Tengri
So what is Tengri now? It is not a church. Most Kazakhs today are Muslims, and Tengrism counts only a few followers. But Tengri does not live in a census. It lives in a flag the colour of the open sky, in the shaңyraq on our emblem, in the kui and the aitys, in our artists who think, in a grandmother’s blessing, in the way we still won’t cut a lone tree. And I see it in the eyes of young Kazakhs: a curiosity about the whole world, a view that is not provincial at all. A generation is remembering its name, and this time in its own language.
If there is one thing I would like you to take away, it is this. Tengri is not paganism. And it is not quite monotheism as Europe knows it. It is one Heaven, beyond the world and present in all of it: an old, elegant, universal idea that humanity once held and nearly forgot.
May I ask you to do something with me, for just ten seconds? Close your eyes. Imagine this horizon, with nothing between you and it. No wall, no screen, no noise. Just the line where the earth meets the sky.
Ten seconds of silence.
That feeling, small and very large at the same time, is where Tengri begins.
I am a nomad. I live in Europe, I travel all the time, I try to own as little as I can, and I belong to no group. In my soul I am a snow leopard. Not because I want to be alone, but because I want to stay free enough for Tengri to come through.
We have an old battle cry:
Өлім жоқ, өмір жас!
There is no death; life is forever young
So the next time you walk out of a building like this one, please look up. The sky you see is not above you. You are inside it. Silver. Green. Blue. Pink.
It all happens within Tengri.
Thank you. Рахмет.
Photo: Nikolai Postnikov
The book
The journey continues in Steppe, made with Nico Kos Earle: the paintings and the land behind them, in a small first edition.
About this text
Aiganym Gali gave this keynote on 4 November 2026 at Kazakhstan at 35: A Symposium on a Transforming Nation, held by the Royal Society for Asian Affairs with the British Embassy in Astana at King’s College London. The text is the talk as delivered, lightly edited for reading.
Images
Landscape photographs: Nikolai Postnikov; Mangystau: Isabella Tabacchi. Paintings and studio: courtesy of the artist. Golden Man of Issyk: eggry, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.