Kenyan-born Clifford (Cliff) J Pereira is a historical geographer, researcher, museum curator and heritage consultant with a portfolio of global projects. He is a world authority on the subject of Zheng He and Africa. Pereira has contributed to numerous publications, radio and documentary programmes. He is best known for his work on Africans in the Indian Ocean World, especially the ‘Bombay African’ narrative and on the Panos de Terra textile of the Cape Verde Islands. Pereira was recently featured on […]
You Mi is a Beijing-born curator, researcher and professor of Art and Economies at the University of Kassel/Documenta Institute. Her academic interests lie in the social value of art, new and historical materialism, as well as the history, political theory and philosophy of Eurasia. She takes the Silk Road as a figuration for re-imagining networks in her long-term research and curatorial project, and has curated exhibitions and programmes including the 13th Shanghai Biennale (2020-21), the research/curatorial platform ‘Unmapping Eurasia’ (2018-) with […]
Slavs and Tatars is an internationally renowned art collective devoted to the area East of the former Berlin Wall and West of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. Since its inception in 2006, the collective has shown a keen grasp of polemical issues in society, clearing new paths for contemporary discourse via a wholly idiosyncratic form of knowledge production: including popular culture, spiritual and esoteric traditions, oral histories, modern myths, as well as scholarly research. The collective’s practice […]
Kokonja is an artist who was born in Aqmola oblysy, Zhalgyzqaragsai in 1996. Based in Almaty, she studied Philology and Interpretive Sociology, and now uses textile and sound art as her languages to create lucid expressions of decolonial practices and experiences. From the generations of traditional craftswomen in her maternal line, who felted, wove and sewed, Kokonja has found the meaning in continuing this mastery as a way of releasing the voices of Kazakh female practitioners’. She also sees sound […]
Based in Almaty, Kazakhstan and elsewhere, Alexandra Tsay is an independent curator and researcher interested in the conjunction between contemporary art and critical theory. Her research interests focus on the politics and aesthetics of contemporary art in transitional societies of Central Asia. Tsay has curated exhibitions and programmed festivals in Almaty. Tsay is also a co-editor of the collective volume Stalinism in Kazakhstan: History, Memory, and Representation (Lexington Books, 2021). During her Spring 2017 fellowship at George Washington University, Tsay […]
You Mi is a Beijing-born curator, researcher and professor of Art and Economies at the University of Kassel/Documenta Institute. Her academic interests lie in the social value of art, new and historical materialism, as well as the history, political theory and philosophy of Eurasia. She takes the Silk Road as a figuration for re-imagining networks in her long-term research and curatorial project, and has curated exhibitions and programmes including the 13th Shanghai Biennale (2020-21), the research/curatorial platform ‘Unmapping Eurasia’ (2018-) with […]
Guzel Zakir is an Uyghur artist based in Kazakhstan who graduated from the Academy of Arts of Abai Kazakh Pedagogical University with a master’s degree in experimental arts and later studied Chinese Painting at the Xinjiang Arts Institute. She works with painting and ceramics on subjects such as identity and memory, and took part in exhibitions in Urumqi, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and the US.
Gulnur MUKAZHANOVA Born in Kazakhstan and based in Berlin, Gulnur Mukazhanova weaves together Central Asian heritage with contemporary artistic enquiry. Through textiles and symbolic materials, she evokes layers of cultural and historical memory. Her works unfold as dialogues between suppressed traditions and today’s shifting realities, reflecting on postcolonial experience, feminism and globalisation. Mukazhanova completed her MA in Textile and Surface Design at the Weissensee School of Art and Design Berlin in 2013. Her recent solo exhibitions include Bosağa – Transition. The […]
Kubra Khademi is an Afghan multidisciplinary artist and a feminist. Through her practice, Kubra explores her life as a refugee and a woman. She studied fine arts at Kabul University, Afghanistan, before attending Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, Pakistan. In Lahore, she began to create public performance, a practice she continued upon her return to Kabul, where her work actively responded to a male dominated society by extreme patriarchal politics. After performing her piece known as Armor in 2015, Khademi […]
Asel Kadyrkhanova is a visual artist and researcher. She holds a PhD from the University of Leeds and an MFA from Newcastle University. Her artistic research looks at art as a medium of memory with a specific focus on memory and trauma in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. Kadyrkhanova works across drawing, moving image and installation art. As a postgeneration artist, she explores traumatic ‘inheritance’, seeking to touch upon traces and symptoms of trauma and confront narratives that persist in postcolonial and post-totalitarian […]