Aziza Kadyri: Combining Ancient Craft With Digital Technology

Aziza Kadiri is one of the most prominent artists of the new generation in Central Asia, whose artistic practice explores themes of migration and identity through personal experiences of diaspora and collective memory, expressing herself through textiles, installations, and performances using new technologies. She was born to a family from Tashkent and has lived in Taiwan, Russia, China, and the UK over the years, which has become one of the key themes in her work—a sense of her dual position, simultaneously inside and outside the culture to which she belongs. Her projects grow from family stories and personal memories, but they are not purely autobiographical, seeking to evoke reflections on how memory is formed and how new forms of collective identity emerge. One of Aziza Kadiri's important tasks is preserving the stories of women, especially her grandmothers and great-grandmothers. Through her work and research into craft techniques like embroidery and textiles, she explores how they serve as valuable bearers of women's experience and how traditions can exist in dialogue with modern technology. This gives voice to these voices. She is also a co-founder of Qizlar, an independent community of female artists and activists from Uzbekistan and the Central Asian diaspora, united by the ideas of mutual support, feminism, and cultural exchange. Today, her name is widely known and associated with major international platforms, although in one of her interviews, she says that she has always loved creativity and wrote the cherished note "I will be an artist," but only recently came to believe in herself. She studied diplomacy, worked in fashion, worked in theatrical costume and set design, mastered digital technologies and immersive practices, and this multilayered experience helped shape her unique artistic style. In 2024, she represented Uzbekistan at the 60th Venice Biennale with the project "Don't Miss the Cue," dedicated to algorithmic biases, migration, and decolonial feminist approaches to technology. Her works have been presented at the Bukhara Biennale, the Watermill Center, KINDL Berlin, the Prague Quadrennial, and other international institutions. And in 2026, the artist was among the laureates of the Art Basel Awards in the Emerging Artist category. The vividness of her ornamentation, which has become one of the most recognizable features of her artistic language, emerged only when the artist allowed herself to embrace the culture of which she has always been a part. And this is not simply an aesthetic choice—it is an act of return. 📍 “Threading Inwards” (March 21 – June 28, 2026)Group Exhibition, CHAT (Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile), curated by WANG Weiwei, Eugene Hannah PARK, KUROSAWA Seiha, WANG Huan