Äsel Kadyrkhanova is a visual artist and researcher, currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam. Her research looks at art as a medium of memory, with a focus on post-Soviet postcolonial Central Asia. As a postgeneration artist, she explores issues of transgenerational memory and trauma, addressing the burden of silenced pasts and unmourned personal losses.

Kadyrkhanova works across drawing, textile, installation art and moving image. Her research interests include haptic visuality, embodiment, affect and trauma. Her works have been shown in Centre for Contemporary Art (Glasgow), Centre for Heritage, Art and Textile (Hong Kong), documenta 15 (Kassel), Calvert Foundation (London), Hackelbury Fine Art (London), Tselinny Centre for Contemporary Culture (Almaty), Kazakh National Museum of Arts (Almaty), YARAT (Baku), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow) among others. Publications include a chapter in edited volumes Stalinism in Kazakhstan: History, Memory, Representation (Lexington Books, 2021) and Suture: Reimagining Ornament (Hong Kong: MillCHAT, 2023).

 

Before her current postdoctoral position, she worked as an Assistant Professor of Fine art at KIMEP University, Kazakhstan. ​She received her PhD from the University of Leeds (2021) and an MFA from Newcastle University (2011).​