Aliya de Tiesenhausen is an independent scholar of twentieth- and twenty-first century Central Asian art. She co-curated Focus Kazakhstan: Post-Nomadic Mind, London, 2018 - the first major exhibition of modern and contemporary art from the country in the UK. She is the author of Central Asia in Art: From Soviet Orientalism to the New Republics, 2016.

1. Introduction: art and culture - actors or representatives? 2. Nation, religion and social heat: heritaging Uyghur mäshräp in Kazakhstan 3. The art of the Sixtiers in Soviet Kazakhstan, or how to make a portrait from a skull 4. Soviet architecture, Kazakh nationalist sentiments and the making of Soviet Kazakhstan, 1925-33: the cases of Kyzylorda and the House of Government of the Kazakh ASSR in Almaty 5. From Sufism to communism: incarnations of the Uyghur song 'Imam Hüsäynim' 6. Contesting convention: agency in Dushanbe's contemporary art scene 7. Queer identity in the contemporary art of Kazakhstan