A visual, video, and installation artist, Asel Kadyrkhanova explores the fields of memory, trauma, and aesthetics by combining art practice with histories of art and cultural theory. She creates fascinating bodies of work employing the moving image, photography, sound, and embroidery. Asel holds a PhD from the University of Leeds. Her practice-led research focuses on memory, trauma, language, post-Soviet, and postcolonial.
Asel is especially interested in memory as a culturally produced construct, and in trauma as im-memory whose traces can persist in societies with traumatic pasts. Through her art, she seeks to touch upon recollection of historical traumas in Kazakhstan, such as the famine of the 1930-s, and total ethnic deportations. She is also interested in observing current metamorphoses in collective memory of the Soviet past, resulting in denials, nationalisms or nostalgia.
