Based in Almaty, Kazakhstan and elsewhere, Alexandra Tsay is an independent curator and researcher interested in the conjunction between contemporary art and critical theory. Her research interests focus on the politics and aesthetics of contemporary art in transitional societies of Central Asia. Tsay has curated exhibitions and programmed festivals in Almaty. Tsay is also a co-editor of the collective volume Stalinism in Kazakhstan: History, Memory, and Representation (Lexington Books, 2021). During her Spring 2017 fellowship at George Washington University, Tsay […]
You Mi is a Beijing-born curator, researcher and professor of Art and Economies at the University of Kassel/Documenta Institute. Her academic interests lie in the social value of art, new and historical materialism, as well as the history, political theory and philosophy of Eurasia. She takes the Silk Road as a figuration for re-imagining networks in her long-term research and curatorial project, and has curated exhibitions and programmes including the 13th Shanghai Biennale (2020-21), the research/curatorial platform ‘Unmapping Eurasia’ (2018-) with […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Saule Dyussenbina is a Kazakh artist. The artist operates with various mediums – painting, graphics, animation, video, and studies the objective world around her home, body, history and memory. She produces a study that leads her to the formation of an archetype and its implementation in the structure of the convergent culture of our time. In her latest works, she often uses the field of applied design – interior design, production of household items. Her works seem to be playing […]
Born in 1990, Marat Dilman is an artist whose work explores visual codes and patterns in relation to the nation-building processes he witnessed growing up in newly independent Kazakhstan. Dilman produces around 6 artworks per year, each with meticulous attention to detail and occasional digital image manipulation. His work is heavily concerned with how technology intervenes with the pre-modernistic archetypes such as ornaments, yurts, traditional clothing and elements of architecture. Vivid colours so common to Dilman’s visual language connect these […]
Lidiya Blinova was a poet, a sculptor, and what is now referred to as a multimedia artist. She was also a jewellery and a graphic designer. In 1971, she graduated from the Faculty of Architecture of the Kazakh Polytechnic Institute in Almaty. At the beginning of her career, she studied in the workshop of Isaac Itkind, a sculptor who was in exile in Kazakhstan. Together with her well-known husband and Kazakh artist Rustam Khalfin, Blinova had organised ‘apartment’ exhibitions of […]