I was born in a huge country that ceased to exist soon after my birth. I was educated as an architect but after a few years of professional practice, I realized that my aesthetic sense was in a deep conflict with what was required of an architect in the country’s period of original accumulation. I knew I wanted to become a freelancer in order to free up time for artistic activities. In the last 8 years, I have participated in over 30 exhibitions and modern art festivals in the CIS and Europe, including the unofficial pavilion of Kazakhstan at the 57th Venice Biennale, and was nominated for Singapore Asia Pacific Breweries Foundation Art Prize.
As an artist who uses modernity as the basis for her projects, I’m interested in the study and deconstruction of various colonial and postcolonial practices: gender, political, environmental, etc. I work in different genres and use mediums and techniques that correspond to the meaning and objectives of a particular project. I use readymades and self-organizing systems a lot in my work. In art, the most important thing for me is to discover new meanings in the process. I believe that the world’s had enough of artists’ self-expression and that it’s time for “the Art of Zen,” when the manifestation of the already existing harmony and the demonstration of the artist’s optics becomes more important than fantasies, and meanings and interpretations become more important than the original myth.