Aziza Kadyri

Biography

Aziza Kadyri is a multidisciplinary visual artist and curator connected to Uzbekistan and based in London, working across textiles, installation, performance, extended reality, and experimental costume. Her practice engages deeply with the textile heritage of Central Asia, particularly the suzani embroidery tradition, examining what happens to inherited craft and cultural memory when it passes through contemporary technology. She served as the lead artist of the Uzbekistan National Pavilion, presenting Don't Miss the Cue, and has continued to develop that inquiry through subsequent bodies of work, including a residency at the Watermill Center focused on textiles, installation, and performance. At Art Basel's Zero 10 sector in 2026, presented by eastcontemporary gallery, Kadyri showed three free-standing textile and metal installations that used a custom-trained AI model to reinterpret inherited suzani patterns, directly interrogating questions of authorship, cultural memory, and collective identity: what does it mean for a machine to learn a craft, and what is lost or transformed in that process? The presentation was recognized with a nomination for the Art Basel Awards 2026 Emerging Artist prize, marking a significant early-career milestone. Kadyri's broader practice also includes an ongoing project titled Her Stage, a moving-image work and series of soft sculptures, exploring themes of invisibility, decolonization, and technological acceleration.