Image: Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester
The Whitworth in Manchester will open "The Manifold of Memory," an immersive installation by the artist Gulnur Mukazhanova, on November 20, 2026. The exhibition, which runs until May 16, 2027, is her first in a UK museum and the first Bagri Commission at the gallery, a new collaboration with the Bagri Foundation that the Whitworth says is intended to bring bold international voices to Manchester. Entry is free.
The project grows out of a single small textile fragment in the Whitworth's collection. Taking it as her starting point, Mukazhanova has enlarged it into a vast environment made of felt and grounded in the nomadic cultures of the Central Asian steppe.
In those cultures, felt is far more than a material. The gallery notes that it has sheltered families, wrapped belongings, travelled across landscapes and held cultural knowledge for centuries, and that it carries associations with memory, home, nature and cosmology. In the installation, the material is given new life as soft, sculptural forms that change as visitors move through the space, with rippling textures, shifting colours and shapes that appear to grow out of the past toward the future.
The Whitworth encourages visitors to take their time, look closely at details and patterns, and experience a work that speaks through touch as much as through sight. According to the gallery, the commission offers an encounter with an artist who is rethinking what textile, memory and contemporary sculpture can be.
