The Foundation was founded in 2026 by a Kazakhstan-based family with longstanding ties to architecture, design, and the built environment. Across generations, architecture has shaped the family’s professional life as well as its broader engagement with culture: how places are made, how histories are preserved, and how ideas acquire material form. Over time, this interest expanded into collecting contemporary art and engaging more closely with the artists, architects, institutions, and cultural practitioners shaping the region today.

Arqa grew from a desire to extend this private engagement into a broader form of cultural support. Rather than establishing a permanent exhibition space or building a programme around a collection, the Foundation is conceived as a platform through which resources can circulate: towards artists and architects, exhibitions and commissions, research and publications, preservation initiatives, and collaborations between local and international institutions.

The name Arqa comes from the Kazakh word арқа—literally, the back or spine, and more broadly, a source of support: that which one can lean upon, or that which stands behind someone. The word carries further resonances within Kazakh language and culture. Arqa evokes the ridge of a landscape, as in Saryarqa, but also ideas of lineage, protection, and unseen support. In older spiritual traditions and vernacular expressions, to have arqa could suggest the presence of an inherited or ancestral force behind a person. For the Foundation, these meanings converge in a simple idea: to support what already exists, while creating the conditions from which something new can emerge.

Rooted in Kazakhstan, Arqa looks both inward and outward. We are interested in the histories and contemporary realities of this place, but also in creating meaningful exchanges across Central Asia and beyond. We see Kazakhstan not as a peripheral context to an established international cultural conversation, but as a place from which new artistic, architectural, and intellectual positions can originate.

As a newly established foundation, ARQA is at the beginning of this work. Its programme will develop through grants, commissions, exhibitions, publications, research, institutional partnerships, and other forms of support responsive to the needs of artists and cultural practitioners. Rather than defining the Foundation through a single building or fixed format, we hope to build an institution through the work, people, and ideas it is able to sustain.