Assel Kadyrkhanova
Assel Kadyrkhanova is a visual artist and researcher; currently, 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. She finds interest in the concepts of embodiment, haptic visuality, place and language, with many of her works offering evocative metaphors to address lasting totalitarian and colonial legacies.
She contributed to the edited volume Stalinism in Kazakhstan: History, Memory, Representation (2021). Her hand-drawn animation film All the Dreams We Dream was screened at Documenta 15, Kassel, as part of the DAVRA Collective public programme (2022), and Calvert Journal Film Festival (2021). She was a CEC Artslink fellow at California College of the Arts, USA, in 2018. Other artist residencies and exhibitions include Post-Nomadic Mind, London (2018), Suns and Neons above Kazakhstan, Baku (2017), Internal Memory: Not enough Space?, Moscow, Astana (2017), Protagonists: The Invisible Pavilion of Kazakhstan, Venice (2015).