Äsel Kadyrkhanova. Photo: Courtesy of the artist Äsel Kadyrkhanova
Äsel Kadyrkhanova is a visual artist and researcher. Currently, she is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam. She holds a PhD from the University of Leeds (2021) and an MFA from Newcastle University (2011). Kadyrkhanova’s art-based research looks at art as a medium of memory with a specific focus on cultural memory and trauma in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. As a postgeneration artist, she addresses traumatic inheritance – the burden of silenced, undocumented pasts and unmourned personal losses. She works across drawing, painting, textile, installation art and moving image, finding interest in the concepts of embodiment, haptic visuality, landscape and language, with many of her works offering evocative metaphors to address lasting totalitarian and colonial legacies.
Kadyrkhanova contributed to edited volumes, such as Cinema and City in the Era of Planetary Urbanisation (Jovis, 2025) and Stalinism in Kazakhstan: History, Memory and Representation (Lexington Books, 2021). Her hand-drawn animation film, All the Dreams We Dream, was screened at documenta 15 as part of the DAVRA Collective public programme (2022). In 2025, she was an artist fellow at Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral in Bad Ems. Other notable exhibitions and residencies include the 18th International Triennial of Textile, Central Museum of Textile Art, Lodz (2025); Asia Pacific Triennial Cinema, QAGOMA, Brisbane (2025); UNIDEE residency at Cittadellarte Fondazione Pistoletto (2023); Clouds, Power and Ornament, MillCHAT, Hong Kong (2023); CEC Artslink fellowship, USA (2018); and Protagonists: The Invisible Pavilion of Kazakhstan, Venice (2015).
Exhibitions
Exhibition: Between Fires – Irradiated Imaginations & Anti-Nuclear Solidarities
Curated by Fabienne Rachmadiev, the exhibition traces the intertwined histories of nuclear infrastructures, colonialism and resistance, presented in collaboration with Sonic Acts
Agenda
