Artist: Clouds, Power and Ornament – Roving Central Asia (K-Z)

Asel Kadyrkhanova is a visual artist and researcher. She holds a PhD from the University of Leeds and an MFA from Newcastle University. Her artistic research looks at art as a medium of memory with a specific focus on memory and trauma in post-Soviet Kazakhstan.

Kadyrkhanova works across drawing, moving image and installation art. As a postgeneration artist, she explores traumatic ‘inheritance’, seeking to touch upon traces and symptoms of trauma and confront narratives that persist in postcolonial and post-totalitarian societies. She has exhibited her works internationally and disseminated her research through publications, artist talks, and conferences.

She is one of the contributors to an edited volume Stalinism in Kazakhstan: History, Memory, Representation(2021). Her recent hand-drawn animation film All the Dreams We Dream was screened at Documenta 15, Kassel, as part of DAVRA Collective public programme (2022), and Calvert Journal Film Festival (2021). In 2018, she was a CEC Artslink fellow at California College of the Arts, USA. Other artist-residencies and exhibitions include Post-Nomadic Mind at Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, London (2018), Suns and Neons above Kazakhstan at YARAT Contemporary Art Space, Baku (2017), and Internal Memory: Not enough Space? At Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow.

Dilyara Kaipova was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan in 1967. In 1990, she graduated from the Department of Decorative Arts  of the Pavel Benkov Republican College of Art. During 1998-2012 Kaipova worked as stage designer at the Mukimi Uzbek State Music Theatre. In 2012-15 she worked in the position of Art Director and Puppet Master at the educational theatre of Uzbekistan State Institute of Arts and Culture. Kaipova is also active in the field of graphic art. In recent years she has extended her creative work to the textile projects which are focused on application of traditional Uzbek patterns and their combination with contemporary motifs.

Kaipova’s works are now in collections of State Silk Museum in Tbilisi, National Gallery of Uzbekistan, MARKK museum in Hamburg, Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam, Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, RISD Museum in Rhode Island, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum, Mardjani Foundation in Russia.

Gulnara Kasmalieva & Muratbek Djumaliev are artistic duo based in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. They graduated respectively in art academies in Moscow and Saint Petersburg in the late 1980s. Artists participated in numerous international exhibitions and biennials, including Aichi Triennale (2016), Sharjah Biennale (2007), Singapore Biennale (2006) and Venice Biennale (2005). Their solo shows were held at the Cube Project Space, Taipei (2013), Laura Bulian Gallery, Milan (2010), Winkleman gallery, New York (2006 -2009) and the Art Institute of Chicago (2007).

Kasmalieva and Djumaliev curated the public art festivals Art Prospect-Bishkek (2017-2018) and the Bishkek International Exhibitions of Contemporary Art (2005-2008). They are the founders of the Arteast School of Contemporary Art (2009-2012) and the art center ArtEast (since 2002). The school fosters a space of dynamic social engagement and represented pedagogical success that allowed it to participate at the Gwangju Biennale (2012). The duo has received the Prince Claus Award, Amsterdam (2010), and was also nominated for Artes Mundi 4 – Wales International Visual Art Prize (2010).

Image courtesy: Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev

Kubra Khademi is an Afghan multidisciplinary artist and a feminist. Through her practice, Kubra explores her life as a refugee and a woman. She studied fine arts at Kabul University, Afghanistan, before attending Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, Pakistan. In Lahore, she began to create public performance, a practice she continued upon her return to Kabul, where her work actively responded to a male dominated society by extreme patriarchal politics. After performing her piece known as Armor  in 2015, Khademi was forced to flee her home country and has lived in Paris thereafter. Her works have been exhibited worldwide. In 2016, Kubra was awarded the title of Knight of art and literature (Chevalierde l’Ordre des Arts et LeHer) by the French Ministry of Culture. After a 6 months’ artist-residency in New York, she was invited to realise the poster of the 76th edition of the Festival d’Avignon.

Kokonja is an artist who was born in Aqmola oblysy, Zhalgyzqaragsai in 1996. Based in Almaty, she studied Philology and Interpretive Sociology, and now uses textile and sound art as her languages to create lucid expressions of decolonial practices and experiences.

From the generations of traditional craftswomen in her maternal line, who felted, wove and sewed, Kokonja has found the meaning in continuing this mastery as a way of releasing the voices of Kazakh female practitioners’. She also sees sound as a multigenerational tool to release these voices. Guided by the movements of her ancestral music, she transcends that legacy in the current and future realities.

Jazgul Madazimova is an artist based in Bishkek and born in Kyrgyzstan. She is primarily interested in public and social practice art. She uses tools of art to work with the issues of women, migration and borders. Madazimova practices a collaborative and socially engaged approach integrating artists, communities and spaces. She studied International and Comparative Politics at the American University of Central Asia and contemporary art practices at ArtEast in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

Gulnur Mukazhanova currently lives and works in Berlin. She graduated from the Kazakh National Academy of Arts in Almaty, Kazakhstan in 2006 and completed her MA in Textile and Surface Design at the Weissensee School of Art and Design Berlin in Germany in 2013.

Her art is not only a confrontation of two different cultures but also a dialogue between them. Greatly influenced by her Central Asian roots, Mukazhanova utilises traditional materials that are not only used for their aesthetics but have a symbolic and historic significance. While living in Germany, she has been confronted by questions about feminism, globalisation and ethnology which have been examined in her work.

Mukazhanova has held solo exhibitions including Öliara: The Dark Moon  at Mimosa House, London (2022) and The Space of Silence  at Aspan Gallery, Almaty (2021). She also participated in the opening performance, as a part of Davra Art Collective created by Uzbek artist Saodat Ismailova, for Documenta 15 , Kassel (2022).

Nazilya Nagimova is a visual artist born in 1982 in Kazan, the Republic of Tatarstan. Since 2004, she lives in Germany. She has been educated at the School of Arts in Kazan then the Academy of Münster, Germany. Nagimova works mainly with textile as a means to approach subjects of memory and identity. Recent exhibitions include Documenta 15 with the Davra collective.

Ayrat and Zafar Nalibayev are the duo behind the cryptographic art of NoolOdin. They were born in Uzbekistan and currently reside in the European Union. Using the jester persona as a means to express their ideas, they believe that art is the most effective way to address sensitive topics without being intrusive. They create their art by coding messages and embedding them in interactive environments. NoolOdin’s art encourages the spectator to think critically, leaving the final interpretation up to the spectator.

Furqat Palvan-Zade is an independent curator, researcher, and filmmaker from Uzbekistan. Since 2014 he has been leading the syg.ma project – a community-run platform and an expanding archive of texts on society and art. This platform serves as an engine and a tool for launching various collaborative projects mapping an international community of writers, activists, artists and designers. As a filmmaker and a researcher, he is working on a series of experimental projects investigating the transient geographies and overlapping cultures of Central Eurasia.

Lena Pozdnyakova is an artist from Almaty living between Berlin and Los Angeles. Currently, she is a doctoral student at the Art History Institute, Free University in Berlin She is an alumna of the Design Theory and Pedagogy programme at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles. She holds a Bachelor Degree in Architecture from Sheffield University and a Masters in Architecture from Anhalt University of Applied Sciences.

Lena has previously worked in UrbanDATA and 3Gatti Architectural Studio in Shanghai. Deciding to go further into the realm of art, she became part of the artistic duo 2vvo, and started a project for interdisciplinary artistic research. Since 2014 she has exhibited works at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Ars Electronica, Bauhausfest, Unsound, and CTM Festivals. In 2014, she received Robert Oxman Prize, and in 2016 as part of the2vvo, Independent Projects Award by CEC Artslink.

Anna Pronina is an interdisciplinary researcher, curator and cultural historian of the Soviet Union, with an emphasis on Central Asia, currently based between Tashkent and Vienna. Pronina pursues a PhD degree in History at Central European University (Vienna). Her research interests include architecture, performing arts, (post)colonial world, nation-building processes and cultural policy in Central Asia. Previous to her PhD research at CEU, Pronina received MA and BA in Cultural studies from Moscow State University. She is also an editor and curator in various projects, including an open research archive of the history and contemporary culture of Central Eurasia on syg.ma. Pronina is a member of Linking Art Worlds: American Art and Eastern Europe from the Cold War to the Present research team supported by the Getty Foundation and Terra Foundation.

Aziza Shadenova is a Kazakh artist born in Uzbekistan. She graduated from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 2011. The majority of her work is based around humour and absurdism involved in perception of life, memories, womanhood and immigration, often focusing on untangling of her roots and thoughts as an immigrant, a woman, a wife, an artist and as a human being. For her, these are observations and engagements with the past and present, and an investigation of how it may reflect on the future. The challenge is to see beyond the history and capture something that has been left in the NOW. She explains, ‘Nothing is outdated. I am trying to discover the beauty in the past because its outcome always leads to some new life.’

Shadenova was one of the few young artists featured in the Central Asian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013). She has participated in group shows at HOME gallery, Manchester (2017), EMMA Espoo Museum of Fine Arts in Finland (2016), Art15 art fair in London (2015), Sotheby’s (2014), Moscow Biennale (2014); as well as exhibitions in Russia, France, Switzerland, Finland, Germany, Luxembourg, Kazakhstan, Argentina and the UK.

Yelena Vorobyeva is a Kazakh conceptual artist who works mainly with her partner Viktor Vorobyov as an artistic duo since the 1990s. Their usage of different genres and techniques results in multi-layered, often ironic, works focusing on post-Soviet realities of constant change, disorientation and their effects on everyday life. The artists have been compiling a precise record of the ephemeral and quotidian details of daily life. They do so in series, sorting images according to their typology. While seemingly insignificant, these details (of objects, colours and customs) are integral to the creation of the new symbols of power and serve as poignant social metaphors.

Vorobyeva has held solo exhibitions in Milchstrassen Gallery, Munich (2000), Open House Oberwart, Austria (1999), and Soros Centers for Contemporary Art, Almaty (1996). Group exhibitions featuring her collaborative projects with Viktor Vorobyev include Human Condition Session V: Teleology of the Human . Biography , Destiny , Hope , Faith . Biography: a Model Kit  exhibition at MMOMA, Moscow (2019), The Missing Planet  at Center for Contemporary Art Luigi Pecci,Prato (2019), Focus Kazakhstan – Eurasian Utopia: Post Scriptum at Suwon I’Park Museum of Art, Suwon (2018), Phantom Stories: Leitmotifs of Post-Soviet Asia , Lunds Konsthall, Lund (2018) and others.

Yang Yeung is a writer on art and an independent curator. She devotes herself to following how artists think, move and make sense of the world. She founded the non-profit soundpocket in 2008 and is currently its Artistic Director. She was co-curator for The Listening Biennial (2021). Her recent publications include ‘What Good is This?’ for After Hope at The Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, ‘caring is a quality: on being touched by Alecia Neo’s Care Index’ for Dance Nucleus, Singapore, an exhibition essay for Francis Alÿs’ Wet feet __ dry feet: borders and games at Taikwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, a review of Sumei Tse’s practice in the Journal of Taipei Fine Art Museum, and a review of Hong Kong-based artist Kwok-hin Tang’s practice in Yishu.

She currently teaches General Education at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She was Asian Cultural Council fellow (2013-14) and resident writer at Contemporary Art Stavanger, Norway (2019). She is also a member of the International Research Network Institute for Public Art, the independent art critics collective Art Appraisal Club (HK), and the International Art Critics Association (HK).

Guzel Zakir is an Uyghur artist based in Kazakhstan who graduated from the Academy of Arts of Abai Kazakh Pedagogical University with a master’s degree in experimental arts and later studied Chinese Painting at the Xinjiang Arts Institute. She works with painting and ceramics on subjects such as identity and memory, and took part in exhibitions in Urumqi, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and the US. 

Madina Zholdybekova is a multidisciplinary artist and illustrator born in Kazakhstan. She addresses questions of women’s bodily integrity, sexuality, multi-dimensional motherhood, kelinism, decolonisation and authoritarian regimes, in work that includes illustration, weaving, sculpture, video and installation. Previously, Zholdybekova has collaborated with openDemocracy, Front Line Defenders and OSCE x CAYN. Her work has been exhibited at Documenta 15, Slavs and Tatars’ Pickle Bar, Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture and Garage Museum.