Aziza Shaden b. (1989, Uzbekistan)
(BA) Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, 2011
Aziza Shaden works across painting, collage, photography, moving image and installation. Born in Uzbekistan and based in the United Kingdom since adolescence, she is concerned with how images and materials outlive the contexts that produced them. Rather than treating migration or cultural identity as explanations for her work, she examines how forms circulate, acquire new meanings and retain traces of conflicting histories. A domestic object can become an abstract structure; an ornament can take on the logic of architecture; a familiar image can remain difficult to place.
Shaden has described her approach as “visual absurdist poetry.” Drawing on collage, avant-garde practices and the Theatre of the Absurd, she uses juxtaposition, disproportion, repetition and contradiction to disturb familiar associations. Humour coexists with unease. Images invite recognition while resisting a single interpretation, allowing personal and historical experiences to enter the work without becoming illustrations of identity.
Collage is both a medium and an organising principle. Shaden cuts images from books, magazines and other printed sources, removing them from their original sequences and constructing new relationships through interruption and layering. Cutting is simultaneously an act of destruction and preservation: a fragment is detached from one context so that it can continue in another. Comparable operations recur in her paintings and installations, where mirrored structures, repeated elements and shifting scales produce compositions open to revision.
Pattern and ornament have become increasingly important. Architectural decoration, mosaics, textiles, braiding, patchwork, Persian miniatures and medieval painting enter into dialogue with contemporary visual culture. Shaden approaches these references not as evidence of cultural authenticity but as systems for organising surfaces, rhythms and spaces. Motifs move between media and periods, changing function as they are translated.
This investigation also questions the distinction between fine art and the decorative or applied arts. Embroidery, textiles and domestic making have often been marginalised within accounts of modern art, despite the knowledge they carry. Shaden is attentive to repetition, labour and skills transmitted through the body rather than written records. Earlier works involving plaits, wool and domestic forms consider how history persists in gestures and everyday materials.
Her recent research into traditional Uzbek straw marquetry extends these concerns. Its processes of cutting, assembling, reflecting and repeating correspond to methods already present in her collage and painting. Rather than staging a return to origins, Shaden explores what happens when a transmitted material technique enters contemporary abstraction and installation.
The post-Soviet condition remains present in her practice, often without explicit iconography. Political structures may disappear while their objects, habits and visual codes endure, altered by memory, nostalgia or misrecognition. Shaden works with these uneven temporalities through reversals, symmetries and unresolved oppositions. An image may be decorative and political, intimate and historical, humorous and unsettling at once. Her work inhabits the intervals between such categories, where inherited visual languages remain alive because they can be cut apart, recomposed and changed.
Text by Azad Asifovich
E: az.shadenova@gmail.com
Solo Shows:
- Textures of grieving, HOP Projects, Folkestone, UK. 2018
- My Cocoon Tightens-Colours Tease, Ainalaiynspace, London, UK. 2022
- Looking Sideways: A Guide to Misinterpreting Myself, The Pill Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey. 2025
Selected Group Shows:
- Clean, Clear, Cut - Malta Biennial 2026, Commissioned by Ta(r)dino 6 Art Platform for Sea Pavilion, Nothing precious Precious nothing, Malta, 2026
- Recipes for Broken Hearts - Bukhara Biennial 2025, Commissioned by the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation - Bukhara, Uzbekistan. 2025
- The Pleasure of Misuse - Dora House, Royal Society of Sculptors, London, UK. 2025
- Lining Revealed - A Journey Through Folk Wisdom and Contemporary Vision - Mill6CHAT, Hong Kong, China. 2025
- Language Without Alphabet - Private Institution, Paris, France. 2025
- I Swear I Saw That - Mathaf Museum of Modern Art, Doha - Qatar - 2024
- How to Hold Your Breath - Asian Art Biennial, Taichung - Taiwan - 2024
- Parcours - Asia NOW Art Fair, Paris - France - 2023
- Preconscious Landscape - AinalaiynSpace - London - UK - 2023
- Thinking Historically in the Present - Sharjah Biennial 15 - Sharjah - UAE - 2023
- Clouds & Power - MILL6CHAT - Hong Kong - China - 2023
- New Mythologies of Central Asia - Sapar Contemporary - New York - USA 2020
- Racing The Galaxy - Astana Art Show 19 - Palace of Independence - Astana - Kazakhstan 2020
- Post-Nomadic Mind - Focus Kazakhstan - Wapping Hydraulic Power Station- London - UK 2018
- Metamorphosis - TSE Gallery - Astana - Kazakhstan 2018
- The Return of Memory - HOME Gallery - Manchester - UK 2017
- In Search of the Present - EMMA Espoo Museum of Modern Art - Espoo - Finland 2017
- At the Crossroads: Contemporary Art from Istanbul to Kabul - Sotheby's - London - UK 2014
- IV Moscow International Biennale for Young Art - RuArts Gallery - Moscow - Russia 2014
- Winter: Poetics & Politics - Central Asian Pavilion - 55th Venice Biennale - Italy 2013
- At the Crossroads: Contemporary Art from Central Asia and the Caucasus - Sotheby's - London -UK 2013
Collections:
- LACMA, Los Angeles, USA
- Moving Image London, London, UK
- National Museum of Kazakhstan, Astana, Kazakhstan
- ABR, Almaty, Kazakhstan
Artist Residencies:
- Protagonists - The Invisible Pavilion of Kazakhstan - IADA - 56th Venice Biennale
- Costumes and Collapse - Curated by Slavs & Tatars, Hoda El Shakry & Leah Feldman at Ria Keburia Residency, Georgia, 2025. (Produced by Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago)
Thank you!