Sludskiy and Veselova assembled works from private collections of 17 artists; the pieces had been gifted to them by friends, colleagues, and partners throughout years.

With an incipient infrastructure to aid the arts, Kazakhstan's institutions are still learning the ropes of fundraising, collecting, and forming educational programs without the ideological interferences from the government. Consequently, artists have been driven to fulfill the role of public entities in archiving their own practices and collecting works by fellow artists.

Unlike works in private or national collections, these exhibits were neither commissioned nor acquired; they had been accumulated without a third party intrusion. This form of collecting relies on artistic inspiration, trust, and intimacy devoid of the influential mechanisms prevalent within the art market.

Vladislav Sludskiy is an independent art consultant and curator based in New York and Almaty. He is the co-founder of ARTBAT FEST, an international contemporary art festival in Almaty serving the Central Asian region. He is also the co-founder and curator at the Eurasian Cultural Alliance dedicated to promoting cultural infrastructure in Kazakhstan and representing local artists abroad. The organization has supported exhibitions at notable venues such as the PERMM Museum of Contemporary Art, the Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMCS), the National Museum of Kazakhstan, and the Kasteyev Museum of Fine Arts. Recently, Sludskiy curated a special public art program of permanent large-scale sculptures as part of the highly anticipated Astana EXPO 2017.

Olga Veselova is the director of ARTBAT FEST, an international contemporary art festival in Almaty, and the deputy director of the Eurasian Cultural Alliance (ECA). Veselova is also the co-founder of the public cultural space ARTPOINT and an advisor for the annual festival Urban Art Astana. She has been a writer for the Central Asian Journal of Art Studies since 2016. She recently consulted for Astana EXPO 2017 and the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.