The identity of the city is perceived through its center. The central districts retain the memory of events and city madmen, buildings of Soviet modernism and of the Stalinist empire, traces of past ideologies and their propaganda. In Almaty, the so-called"golden square", as a place of attraction, has gathered around itself the main components of visual and semantic identity, which is formed in the minds of citizens and internal migrants.

The general concept of the exhibition Microworlds casts doubt on the prevailing stereotypes through a slice of reality, moving away from the general to the particular. It offers a study of the periphery – the microdistricts as the manifestation of the ideological identification of the area.