Kadyri combines extended reality (AR/VR) and traditional art forms in works exploring the themes of decolonization, displacement, feminism, identity, social invisibility, and migration
Aziza Kadyri’s work – blending extended reality (AR/VR) with traditional art forms
The work of multidisciplinary artist Aziza Kadyri is a blend of apparent dichotomies: traditional and digital art, heritage and technology, and the tangible and the virtual. Born in Russia to Uzbek parents, raised in China, and living in London, Kadyri has been engaging in the Central Asian and Uzbek artistic, cultural, and societal panorama, exploring the themes of decolonization, displacement, humanity, women and feminism, identity, migration, and social invisibility in her works, which combines extended reality (AR/VR) and traditional art forms.
A deeper connection – falling in love with the plasticity of textiles
Kadyri’s career in the arts started with her degree in Fashion Design from Beijing’s Tsinghua University and her MA in Performance Practice and Design at Central Saint Martins. Still, the artist’s interest in the world of textiles, costumes, and embroidery has much deeper roots tracing back to her family links to the Uzbek textile industry, which is deeply tied to the Russian colonial rule on the Central Asian country.
«Most of my mom’s side of the family worked in the textile industry in what is now Uzbekistan and used to be the Uzbek SSR, part of the USSR. My grandfather and grandmother worked in the textile university, and my mother worked in the fashion industry until she moved from Uzbekistan to another country. The presence of sewing machines and fabrics made me comfortable around these materials». The London-based artist told Lampoon Magazine. «I feel historically tied to fashion and textiles because that’s what I’ve seen my family doing and what I have been doing myself. When I was studying art in school, I studied academic painting, but it wasn’t my favorite: my favorite was Batik, which is essentially creating paintings but on fabrics».
The plasticity and changeability of textiles have also attracted Kadyri to these art forms. «Wearable art is like a sculpture in constant dialogue with the body. It’s ever-changing, and it’s adapting, so as a form, it reflects my own experience of constantly moving and adapting between countries. Because I have lived in so many different places, I’ve changed as I had to adapt and assimilate in so many different cultures, and that form speaks to me better because of that».
Learning by doing – from costume design to digital art and extended reality
When Kadyri first dipped her toes into the world of digital art, she worked as a costume designer in the world of live theater and performance. At first, she got curious about 3D modeling. What appealed to her was not only the possibility of creating faster by incorporating 3D into her work but that, to Kadyri, it was uncharted territory.
«I have a problem: I’m interested in many things, and I always think I can do them. I call it hubris. My biggest fear in life is losing interest in learning. I know that can happen when you get older; you stop learning. So, I always attempt new things, even if I end up wasting my time. That’s what makes me go for things. In that way, I’m similar to my dad: I inherited his clinical optimism».
Following her curiosity, Kadyri downloaded Blender and taught herself 3D modeling, releasing it soon enough that it suited her on an artistic and personal level.
«I don’t like cleaning up messes, and creating digitally creates no mess. You open your laptop, work, and then you close your laptop; you don’t have to clean up paint or put everything back in the boxes».
The artist’s first encounter with extended reality followed a similar pattern, with curiosity and optimism playing a pivotal role in the evolution of Kadyri’s artistic expression, whose interests span beyond humanity. Against the backdrop of a paralyzed theater and performance sector amid the first COVID-19 lockdowns, the artist looked at other performing approaches.
«I just downloaded a free augmented and virtual reality program at a time when a lot of colleagues of mine were also looking into making exhibitions in VR, and I did my first online residency. So I reached a point when I thought: well, I’ve taught myself 3D modeling, so now I can make those things into extended reality and bring them into my space, like digital costumes or digital sculptures».
A fusion of methodologies – combining textiles and embroidery with virtual and extended reality in art
«I have such different polar interests. One of them is art that is inspired by my culture, and the other is digital art, which always tends to be very futuristic. So I have been going on an exploration of how we can combine those two».
An example of this combination is the artist’s project titled ‘9 Moons’. Exhibited at the Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien in Berlin, this piece centers around the ‘herstories’ of the womanity in Kadyri’s family from the 1920s till now and women’s tangled identities in Uzbekistan. The beating heart and starting point of this piece is Kadyri’s great-grandmother Oybibi’s dowry: a piece of traditional Suzani embroidery of the Jizzakh region.
This textile features nine identical rosettes called ‘oy’ which in Uzbek means ‘moon’ or ‘month’ in a three-by-three grid. The Suzani was cut into pieces and distributed to various family members during the artist’s infancy. Kadyri’s family was left with two parts from which the textile’s creative reconstruction started.
«The idea was to use these two pieces as a starting point to reconstruct what would have been, but not to reconstruct it directly. I wanted to use these circles as a structural point around which I can weave the stories and the images that are associated with specific stories of the women in my family to not only reconstruct a physical piece but also a metaphorical piece, bringing together these stories that formed me as a human being and creating a non-hierarchical genealogical tree of women whose stories weren’t written down».
The loose pieces, born in collaboration with embroiderer Yulduz Mukhiddinova, and the hidden layer of extended reality explore the theme of female invisibility and the oral history of women, familial mythopoesis, and women’s struggles with colonialism, ideology, and the patriarchy in Uzbekistan.
Stories of womanity – shining a light on women artists in history
«I went to school in Russia. Most of the art history I was taught was Western, male-centric, Eurocentric art history. I was taught to adore the Masters, I was taught to adore all the male painters, and there was never any attention given to the women creatives. At the time, when I was much younger, I didn’t question it. I was being brought up with this idea of admiring all these elitist things, so I had to work on myself to dismantle that and decolonize this thinking». The artist explained.
Kadyri’s interest in the work of women artists in history influences not only her artworks with their ties to traditional textiles and embroidery but also her presence in the art world. The artist is, in fact, co-founder and coordinator of Qizlar, a grassroots feminist collective based in the capital city of Uzbekistan, Tashkent, and shares information about Central-Asian and Uzbek traditional textiles and embroidery, highlighting their role as forms of activism and storytelling during times in which women were barred from politics and the artificiality of the divide between art and ‘craft’.
«The art forms that are traditionally linked with invisible feminine labor are a chunk of art that represents the experience of many people, half of the world’s population, and it has been historically ignored. But if you look into those pieces that were created in a domestic context, you’ll find so many stories and so much information that is not present in the things you are used to seeing. Gaining this perspective and seeing that it is no worse or lesser than all the other perspectives is a decolonial shift. Because you’re saying nothing is less or more important. It is crucial to look at this to understand the processes happening inside and outside of art because art is always political, even if it’s apolitical. After all, it always exists in a context».
Exploring AI bias in art – who is shaping humanity’s collective imagination?
In her work, Kadyri uses her signature combination of traditional art and new technology to look at how biases have shaped people’s perceptions in the past, the present, and, if unchecked, the future. In her ‘AI Suzani series’, Kadyri explored the theme of AI bias by asking her custom AI, trained on images of Suzani embroidery, to interpret pictures of the artist’s face. The results revealed biases that can be linked to the limited data used to train such models, which reflect the narrow viewpoint of their finite, homogenous group of developers.
«The AI Suzani series emerged like an experiment, and now, after having generated thousands and thousands of images, I’m starting to see how the AI behaves. I didn’t train an entire AI from scratch; I am using an existing one, and I trained a tiny locus of it on Suzani. Hence, it still draws a lot of its references from the databases that the engineers who created it used. The bias is an issue that exists across all different platforms that offer user-accessible AI. These databases have a limited understanding of the complexities of our world».
Aziza Kadyri
Aziza Kadyri earned her degree in Fashion Design from Tsinghua University in 2017 and a MA in Performance Design and Practice with Distinction from Central Saint Martins in 2020. She is originally from Uzbekistan and lives in London where she works as a multidisciplinary artist and the Creative Lead at no-code AR creation platform Blippar.
