Lidiya Blinova was a poet, a sculptor, and what is now referred to as a multimedia artist. She was also a jewellery and a graphic designer. In 1971, she graduated from the Faculty of Architecture of the Kazakh Polytechnic Institute in Almaty. At the beginning of her career, she studied in the workshop of Isaac Itkind, a sculptor who was in exile in Kazakhstan.
Together with her well-known husband and Kazakh artist Rustam Khalfin, Blinova had organised ‘apartment’ exhibitions of unofficial artists in Almaty. An intellectual and a profound creative spirit, Blinova often developed her ideas and realised conceptual projects together with Khalfin, who called her his ‘alter ego’. As most of her projects were ephemeral in nature, there is almost no work remaining of Blinova, but her installations and performances have left a deep mark on the history of Central Asian art.
After Blinova passed away, her works have exhibited in many group exhibitions, including Eurasian Utopia: Post Scriptum at Suwon I’Park Museum of Art, Suwon (2018) and Bread and Roses: Four Generations of Kazakh Women Artists at MOMENTUM, Berlin (2018).