An evening with AZIZA KADYRI

In this talk, Aziza Kadyri explores how memory moves across bodies, stories, spaces, and archives within her artistic practice. Working with spoken accounts, personal diaries, institutional collections, spatial encounters, and AI datasets, Kadyri approaches memory as something active and evolving rather than fixed. Her work considers how memory is shaped through repetition, translation, and changing perspective over time. Drawing on her Central Asian heritage and diasporic experience, Kadyri produces immersive, technology-driven works that employ magical realism to evoke and transmit memory across spatial and bodily registers.

Speaker

Based in London, Uzbek visual artist Aziza Kadyri works across textiles, installation, performance, sculpture and creative technologies. She co-founded Qizlar, a grassroots collective rooted in intersectionality and social change. Kadyri examines themes of social invisibility, displacement, decolonisation and identity. Using textiles and costume, she reimagines cultural heritage and traditional narratives through artificial intelligence, machine learning and extended reality, weaving together speculative stories that preserve memory, resist erasure, and contribute to alternative mythmaking. Her participatory approach engages local communities and artisans while situating her within wider conversations on decolonial aesthetics and feminist technology.

Kadyri has held solo exhibitions at Somerset House (2025) and Pushkin House (2024), London; and eastcontemporary, Milan (2024). She represented Uzbekistan at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024) and participated in the Bukhara Biennial (2025) and the 5th Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art (2025). She was a finalist of CIRCA Prize 2025 and the Gold medallist of the 18th International Triennial of Textile.

Image credit: 9 Moons, Aziza Kadyri