Artist Talk & Screening – On artmaking, dreams, and legacies of violence
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28.04.2024
Asel Kadyrkhanova
15:00—15:35
Artist talk
15:40—16:00
Screening: All the Dreams We Dream
16:00—16:15
Q&A
How do we remember historical atrocities that have not been visually documented? How can artmaking create spaces to touch upon legacies of violence and transgenerational traumas? What is a post-Soviet condition?
In this talk, I will present my research and artistic practice that addresses the legacies of Stalinism and colonialism in Kazakhstan, a post-soviet formerly nomadic Central Asian country. It will include a screening of my hand-drawn animation film All the Dreams We Dream (21 min, 2020), which explores the non-memory of the Kazakh famine in the 1930s. As the film reworks memoirs of witnesses into a non-linear oneiric narrative, it aims to tell the story of famine’s unremembered victims whose voices have been silenced by the politics of censorship and erasure. I will address questions of violence, the persistence of trauma, the disappearance of nomadism, and the power of an artist to create counter-narratives.
Asel Kadyrkhanova is a visual artist and researcher with a PhD from the University of Leeds. Currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Amsterdam, she looks into the potential of art as a medium of memory, with a particular focus on cultural memory and trauma in post-Soviet postcolonial contexts. She works across drawing, textile, moving image and installation art. Recent exhibitions include Medium and Memory (curated by Griselda Pollock, London 2023), Clouds, Power and Ornament (Hong Kong, 2023), goEast Film Festival (Wiesbaden 2023), Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival (Glasgow 2023), documenta 15 (Kassel, 2022) Calvert Journal Film Festival (London 2021), and others. Kadyrkhanova disseminates her research in conferences, artist talks and publications. She has contributed to the edited volume Stalinism in Kazakhstan: History, Memory, Representation.