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.