The Four Lamps (Chor-chirog)
Aziza Kadyri is a multidisciplinary artist focusing on extended reality (AR/VR), live/digital performance, experimental costume, and textiles. Aziza's approach is grounded in a fusion of collaboration and interdisciplinary methodologies that drive the creation of immersive experiences. She is deeply interested in participatory practices with local communities and her projects explore the themes of migration, displacement, social invisibility, identity, decolonisation, feminism, and language. Originally from Uzbekistan, she graduated with a degree in Fashion Design from Tsinghua University, Beijing in 2017. She was awarded an MA in Performance Practice and Design with Distinction from Central Saint Martins in 2020. Throughout her professional career, she has produced designs for theatre, live performance, film, and XR projects internationally across the Eurasian continent. Aziza is a co-founder and coordinator of Qizlar — a grassroots feminist collective based in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, a UK Associate at Delfina Foundation in London, and a Creative Lead at Blippar — an augmented reality company based in London, UK. Her work and workshops received global recognition at events, such as 2023 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space (Czechia), Goethe Institut (Uzbekistan), 6th Tallinn Photomonth Biennial (Estonia). She was awarded 1st place in the Workshops category at Athens Digital Arts Festival (Greece). Aziza lives and works between London, UK, and Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
In the new series, Aziza Kadyri explores the material environment of the 9 Moons universe. First exhibited in Berlin in 2022, the project is an artistic and documentary study on female narratives within Aziza’s family, utilising traditional Uzbek embroidery aesthetics and extended reality technologies as methods. With her latest pieces, Aziza invites the audience to delve into the virtuality and materiality of familial female memories. Aziza constructs new digital objects, drawing on her rigorous research and further developing her findings using artificial intelligence. She trained her own AI generator using images of traditional Suzani embroidery, crafting symbolic objects of imaginary memories. The creative process started with 2D images, produced by the AI generator based on Aziza’s requests. Then, Aziza transformed them into 3D. In this sense, Aziza's collaboration with AI once again raises important questions about collective memory and its material and sensory dimensions. How has the process of constructing collective memory changed with the development of AI technologies? Do we still remember anything, or is there something else that remembers instead of us? These new artworks draw upon objects that can be described as iconic in a sociological sense. For example — the cotton boll. With many generations in Uzbekistan being involved in cotton production, these bolls have become significant beyond their agricultural meaning. They are remnants of the Soviet agro-industrial colonial project, which has had and continues to have enormous societal and ecological impacts on the lives of people in the region. Aziza’s dark and ominous vision of this object resembles a mushroom cloud or a cancerous growth that challenges the nature of this particular colonial project.
