Dina Kemal Marchant’s collecting life began with a pair of 17th-century Japanese screens — and has since widened into a sustained commitment to Central Asian contemporary art.
Born in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and based in London for nearly 30 years, Marchant has built a profile that bridges collecting, patronage, and education. She founded Stories of Art in 2017 after studying art history, and now supports the Kazakhstan Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale as well as artist residencies at London’s Delfina Foundation.
Her first purchase, made 28 years ago after she arrived in London and started work at PricewaterhouseCoopers, was a rare pair of six-leaf gold screens titled “Tales of Genji.” Marchant said the screens have remained together for more than four centuries and still hang on the main staircase of her Chelsea home, where they sit comfortably beside contemporary works.
Her latest acquisition is a cyber textile by Almagul Menlibayeva, “The Map of Nomadizing Reimagining” (2023). Marchant described it as one of the leading Central Asian female artist’s most important works, made after four decades of practice. The piece maps 12 multi-channel video installations filmed across Central Asia and Iran, and reflects on a region she sees as historically central to scientific, intellectual, and cultural exchange.
Marchant said she rarely buys quickly. Research, conversations with artists, and a close reading of the ideas behind a work all shape her decisions. She is especially drawn to art that engages political, ecological, or historical questions.
That outlook also explains one of her regrets: not buying work by Adrian Ghenie, whose charged imagery and dense color first caught her attention at Haunch of Venison, when his paintings were still priced in the low five figures.
Asked which work she would take from any museum, Marchant chose Marcel Duchamp’s “Boîte-en-valise,” the compact “portable museum” that condenses an artist’s career into a single object and unsettles conventional ideas of originality and display.
When she is in Basel, Marchant favors Les Trois Rois for coffee or drinks, Volkshaus Basel for dinner, and Namamen for a quick meal. And when the fair circuit becomes too much, she heads for Museum Tinguely — a quieter counterpoint to the social choreography of Art Basel.
