Aziza, if I were to introduce you, how should I introduce you?
The most awesome...
No, no, no, okay.
Not that easy to describe what I do, because it's unreal and I love it.
It's the most unreal thing I've ever done being an artist.
Why feminism is so misunderstood in our culture?
There's a lot of reasons for that.
Lack of proper resources that explain what feminism actually is about.
Oh, military service, or you want women to serve as well?
Well, if women were in charge, they wouldn't start wars.
You know, women would be in the army,
and women would be in the army,
and then they'd be in the army,
and women would be in the army,
and women would be in the army because they are in the army.
So, women, like I said,
women are not girls,
are girls,
and women are not really
giving a lot of opportunities,
a lot of negativity,
and so on,
so women are feeling quite restrained
and restricted in what they can say.
Oh my god.
just took it as, well you don't need Ospec anymore, tutu-lu!
With every language you sort of gain a new part of your personality.
In English I exist in a certain way, in Russian I exist in a different way,
in Mandarin I'm a completely different person.
And then with Ospec there's this part of my personality that sort of got lost.
Because I was never allowed to feel like I was one of the people there.
I could completely leave the environment I was in and find myself in a new environment with new people.
I was able to reinvent myself.
People, you know, they would come out to me during the opening week and they'd be like, you know,
we're not from Central Asia, we don't know much about Central Asia, but I came out of the exhibit crying.
Where had you raised Uzbekistan and Uzbekness?
Oh yeah, I forgot to say, when I was in school every summer we would hang out.
So Uzbekistan was always there?
It was always there.
You were feeling Uzbek or Russian or Chinese?
We have just recorded an amazing episode with Aziza Kadri, a multi-disciplinary artist,
co-founder of Kuzlak Collective and who has recently been commissioned to prepare the Uzbekistan Pavilion
at Venice Biennale.
Aziza, what was the episode about and why people should watch it till the end?
Aziza, origin story, how I grew up in Taiwan, thought I was a Chinese girl.
Then I was probably moved to Russia where I started struggling a little bit with my identity.
Then we talked about how I divide my family and became an artist and all these really long-winded,
strange ways of me straying away from being an artist and then coming back to becoming an artist.
It's a nice and encouraging tale for anyone who wants to be creative in certain constraints that might exist in their context
and how you can still do things that you love.
It's a very inspirational story.
Please do watch till the end and Aziza agreed to answer the questions that you put in the comments personally on her Instagram.
Not all of them.
We will pick the best questions, the most interesting questions and I will answer them on my reels on Instagram.
That was good. You can continue.
Can we pause?
Aziza, if I were to introduce you, how should I introduce you?
The most awesome!
Let's not go there.
How would you introduce me?
I always tell people that I'm an artist, multi-disciplinary artist.
Rarely do people understand what that means from get-go.
Usually people are like, oh, so what do you paint?
And then I have to go and say, oh, I actually don't paint.
I don't really enjoy painting.
I do all these other things.
So it is really not that easy to describe what I do.
And I have a really good friend who once said me a meme, which said,
if you have to explain your job in more than two sentences, it's not a real job.
Okay.
So this is kind of...
Explain me your job in less than two sentences.
Yeah, this is kind of where I am at.
I don't have a real job in a way because it's unreal and I love it.
It's the most unreal thing I've ever done being an artist.
It's something that I think consciously and subconsciously I've been trying to do my entire life.
Jumping through hurdles and all kinds of things.
And obviously lately, people especially in Uzbekistan know you because of your involvement in Venice Biennale.
That as well.
There has been a massive sort of thing that came along.
We'll talk about that in much more detail.
But before that, you said that the women in your family are the main storytellers.
You watched my video.
I did.
Someone went on my website.
Tell me your story.
My story.
What exactly do you want to know?
Because there's so many different directions I could go.
Let's start from the beginning.
Because I believe that one person's childhood is one of the most influential bits of their life.
That forms and shapes life.
That is true.
I think in my case that definitely is true.
I come from an Uzbek family.
My family is from Tashkent.
And all of them grew up around school number 110.
It sounds weird to say it in English.
So quite central.
So both my mom and my dad lived on either side of that school.
That's kind of well known.
I wasn't born in Tashkent.
I didn't actually really live in Uzbekistan.
I didn't grow up in Uzbekistan.
I was born in Moscow.
Because my father, when he was young, when he was 17, he went to Moscow to study.
He went to the Bauman University.
He did nuclear physics.
As you do.
It was the Soviet times.
Something which actually my dad is the nuclear physicist as well.
Really?
Did he actually work as a nuclear physicist?
He studied at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Tashkent.
So maybe they know each other as well.
I don't think so.
Because I don't think my dad actually ended up working as a nuclear physicist in Uzbekistan.
He studied.
So he studied nuclear physics and nuclear reactors and stuff.
I don't actually know the details.
And I should probably ask him more about it.
Around the time he was actually going into the research and actually working within the industry.
The Soviet Union collapsed.
So that's not the best situation to be in when you're trying to be a researcher.
Because obviously there were no more grants or money that were directed into that direction.
So yeah, he had to do something else.
But he stayed in Russia and then met my mom.
In Russia?
No, in Tashkent.
They were set up by my dad's cousin.
It's a whole other story, but it's a story for them to tell.
Right.
And yeah, I was born in Moscow in the 90s.
But soon after that, my dad, because he started his own business, he moved to Taiwan.
Out of all places.
His business was something that was electronics then.
Exactly.
It was literally what I was going to say next.
So it has to do with electronics, chips and all that.
So he moved to Taiwan and then my mom and I, we followed.
And yeah, I spent about five and a half years, almost six years in Taipei.
How old were you when you moved to Taiwan?
Well, maybe, I was not even one year old.
Oh, okay.
So I was born in Moscow.
I lived in Moscow for a couple of months and then we moved to Tashkent.
So I spent sort of like seven months in Tashkent as a baby.
And then before I was one, we moved to Taipei.
And that's where I sort of got my first exposure to life in general.
Inside the video folder places.
How was it?
It was, I mean, again, as a child, it's just something that you grew up in and you don't form a critical opinion about it.
Because that's your life, everything you know.
You grew up, for the first couple of years, I thought I was Chinese, I was Taiwanese.
Like I had no idea that could be from some other country.
I went to a Chinese kindergarten for a year or so.
So Mandarin really was my second language after Uzbek.
So my parents spoke Uzbek to me.
They spoke Russian to each other, which turned into a secret language for parents.
I didn't learn Russian until I was six.
And so Mandarin was my second language.
And I think maybe, consciously as a child, I was like, well, you have a secret language.
I'm going to have my own secret language.
And I started speaking Mandarin to my parents, which they did not speak.
So my mom had to go and learn Chinese and she even did some competitions and she got some prizes for that.
But yeah, I basically forced my parents to learn Mandarin so they can understand what I want when I was two years old.
And then they put me into an international kindergarten, which was this equivalent of international schools.
We have English teachers and stuff.
So English was my third language that I learned when I was about three or four.
And this is where languages started to get confusing because I would...
For some reason, I didn't have any structure in the way I spoke those languages.
So I would mix all the words together.
I would put all three languages in the same sentence and all of that, which was, I guess, fine.
Is it when talking to your parents or talking to...
Well, talking to my parents mostly, yeah, family.
Because, yeah, I wouldn't speak Uzbek to anyone else.
And yeah, when I was six, we moved back to Moscow.
And I didn't always speak Russian, but my parents sort of put me into a...
A Russian school.
Obviously a Russian school, just a normal school, nothing special.
The only special thing about the school was that it had Chinese, Mandarin Chinese as a sort of second, third language.
Right.
Because they were like, oh, it'd be a pity if you forgot Mandarin.
Which I did.
I did forget it. And then because I was put into this environment where I could sort of pick it back up, I can still speak it.
But then, because Russian was replacing, I guess, Uzbek in this paradigm that I found myself in when I was six years old,
because everyone just stopped speaking Uzbek to me completely.
Including your parents.
Including my parents.
Because, you know, it was out of very sort of noble intentions where they're like, oh, you have to integrate to the society.
You have to speak Russian.
You have to learn it as fast as possible.
So we're going to speak Russian to you now.
But my brain just took it as, well, you don't need Uzbek anymore.
Toodaloo!
Yeah.
So that's why I don't...
Unfortunately, I don't speak Uzbek anymore.
I sort of lost it.
And it's a big regret of mine.
Why?
Why do you regret?
Because it's a great way to connect to my heritage and to the knowledge that I currently do not have access to.
Because I do a lot of work.
I'm going to talk about it properly.
That is connected to sort of familial histories and stories that happened in the past.
And a lot of that knowledge and a lot of these sources are very often in the spec.
And it just feels like there's a huge chunk of knowledge that I don't have access to.
Right.
And also, you know, when I work with people, with, let's say, the artisans that I work with,
you know, for them, often it is easier to speak Uzbek or Tajik, which, again, nobody spoke Tajik in my family,
so it's not an option, but like even Uzbek.
And I would love to be able to communicate in this language that is more comfortable to them.
There's many reasons.
And I think I just like the sound of Uzbek as well.
It has nothing to do with you kind of losing your ties with Uzbekistan,
because Uzbekistan was always present in your life.
It was.
I don't know if it's about losing ties.
It is.
Here's the thing.
With every language, you sort of gain a new part of your personality.
Because in English, I exist in a certain way in Russian.
I exist in a different way in Mandarin.
I'm a completely different person.
And then with Uzbek, there's this part of my personality that sort of got lost.
Right.
And it wasn't lost, but it just never developed into something when I sort of became an adult.
The reason why I'm focusing on this that much is obviously I am bringing up kids here.
And we are having our own struggles with the language.
And there are a lot of viewers who might be experiencing the same thing.
And as the parents, what do you think we could do different?
What could your parents do different so that you would have better links with your language, your native language?
It depends so much on the context.
Because growing up in Russia, it has a very specific attitude and a very specific history with Central Asia.
I'm not going to go into negative things right now because we all know what they are.
But growing up in a society where you weren't really, and this is something I realized,
much after the fact that I never actually really felt like I belonged because I was never allowed to feel like I was one of the people there.
In a way, like everyone would always remind me in the most subtle way that I'm still a little bit of an outsider that I'm Uzbek.
You know, in school, this is something I tell as an example.
I was a straight A student. I was a nerd.
I would get all my A's and B's and go on my way.
But still, until the day I graduated, I would do mock exams for example.
There would be a mock exam for the Russian language.
And then I would get a 100, or an exam out of 100.
And there would still be a comment being like, oh wow, look, Aziza got 100 even though she's Uzbek.
I was like, I grew up with you guys.
You know me. You know my story.
Why is there a need to highlight the fact that I am not the same as you?
So again, this is the context, which is followed by specific sort of, I guess, colonial attitudes if you want to go there.
My perspective is going to be a bit different. I don't know if I can give really good advice to parents who are bringing their kids here because it's a very different context,
especially London where it's so multicultural and I don't know if there's the same kind of situation.
But do you think that it is important for us to make sure our kids preserve the language?
For you as parents.
For us as parents, yes.
My perspective as a kid, I'm going to speak as a kid right now.
As a kid, yes. As a kid who went through the similar kind of, as an international kid even.
As a kid, when I was a kid, I didn't really care.
And I was actually happy to not really be associated with it because of those contexts that I told you about because of that.
And stigma and everything.
They would say things like, oh, you're Uzbek but you're not that kind of Uzbek. You're a different Uzbek.
And unfortunately back then, that would make me feel, oh, maybe they've accepted me, maybe I am different from the other, whatever kind of Uzbek they were alluding to.
You wouldn't mind not knowing Uzbek as a kid.
But looking back now.
Yeah, as a kid. The same thing. It's going to be a bad comparison.
But I used to study piano when I was a kid. I liked the idea. But then it was so tedious. It was so long.
And it just took a lot of my energy. And I didn't like the teacher and all of that.
And I begged my parents to stop.
Like, I don't want to go to music school anymore.
And my parents were like, oh, you're going to regret it for the rest of your life.
And I'm like, no, I'm not.
And then guess what? I regret it.
I regret it a lot. And I think I understand that maybe it wasn't completely under my control, you know, the knowledge of the language.
Because growing up in Russia and maybe my parents also didn't just, didn't have the time or energy to maintain the language because everyone had to survive in a way.
So now looking back at it and looking back at the context and understanding better what kind of situation that was, I think I've regretted.
And as like, so for as parents, I think maybe right now your kids are not going to be very receptive to it.
But down the line, further down the line, I think they will be grateful for the fact that they have this language, even though it's not perfect and stuff.
Because again, even if you think about career opportunities and personal growth and all of that, the fact that I know several languages is really, really helping me,
even if it's not helping me directly, because you have a wider sort of outlook in the world.
You understand perspective of different people from, you know, China in my case to the UK and further.
So they will have this extra language that was going to be this lens through which they can look at things that is different from other people's lens.
I agree, I agree. And going back to your kind of experience growing up in Moscow, what aspect of that period of your life you think has shaped you to become who you are now?
What aspect?
You mentioned belonging, a number of times we were discussing the language. Do you think that it was some sort of a driving force so that you can prove that you are one of them?
Or was that not the case?
This is going to turn into a therapy session, I think.
Which you don't mind?
We should have a few.
I think it's a very good observation that you have right now that you had about belonging, because I do feel like I always wanted to fit in a way.
And I was never given this kind of luxury, I think, not completely.
So I would fit in, but in a very weird way. Something would still be sticking out, kind of out of the mold, which would still differentiate me.
And also the fact that, again, as I said, I was a nerd, I was a straight A student, didn't really help in this realm of teenage drama and all of that.
And what really shaped me is wanting a chance to reinvent myself.
Because, again, when you go to school and you grew up with the same people for 11 years, it's always the same people, your teachers are, everyone's the same.
It's not like here, for example, you go to different schools every couple of years, you know, you go to primary school and then something else.
And you change and you have these opportunities to reinvent yourself.
But in Moscow, it was just first grade, 11th grade, same people, nothing changes.
So it becomes hard when, for example, I was quite a shy kid before I was maybe 13.
Actually, between the ages of maybe 7 and 13, I was very shy.
And I was not able to really speak my mind in front of my peers.
I was fine with teachers and answering in classes and stuff.
But with my peers, I was quite shy and kind of not really easy to open up for me.
After that, I started to change.
But then because there was this idea of me that already existed, it was hard to reinvent myself and actually show that I was becoming a different person.
And so on.
So I think not really my life in Moscow, but there was this moment where I changed.
And I had this opportunity to change is when I moved to China, when I was 17.
Why did you move to China when you were 17?
To escape a little bit of reality that I created for myself.
Sounds very dramatic. It's not. It's not dramatic.
I think it does have to peer pressure a little bit.
So because I was doing languages and history in school and these were the subjects that I was really interested in.
I loved linguistics. I loved studying history, all kinds of history.
I loved social sciences and all of that.
I also liked art, but I wasn't well prepared to go into any art school in Russia.
Because I was focusing more on actually decorative arts.
So when I was doing classes, sort of extracurricular work, I did a lot of textiles.
Everything is coming together now in my mind, all the map of my journey.
So I did textiles and it was like batik, you know, it's painting on fabric and all of that.
But it's not necessarily what is required to go to an art school in Russia.
Because you have to have done academic painting, academic drawing, which I have a little bit, but it wasn't good.
So my path was to just go and apply for the degrees, I guess, that have to do with history, languages.
International relations made sense to me and a lot of people from my school were actually going and pursuing international relations.
But also on the other hand, my family, I guess a little bit myself as well, expected me to go to a prestigious place.
Because like, wow, you know, we will have bragging rights and all of that.
So sort of because of this peer pressure, I applied to Moscow State University.
I applied to Mgymo, which is the Moscow International Relations Institute.
Moscow State Institute of International Relations, which is the main place where diplomats come out.
And then another university, I forgot, which was also in the top three.
And I got in all of them. It was all for international relations and Mandarin.
And I got on a quota for free scholarship kind of situation. Everyone was really happy. It was great.
I ended up giving my final decision and accepting the offer from Mgymo from the State University of International Relations.
And everyone was like, oh, it's so hard to get in. We always thought only children of diplomats could do that.
I got in and I went to one day of class and I went to the dean and I said, I want to take academic leave.
First day.
And he gave it to me. He was like, all right.
Which is not a situation that ever happens to people.
But I think all the stars just aligned in a way where I realized that maybe it's not necessarily what I want to do after the first day.
And the dean was in a good mood, probably. I don't know.
And he was like, all right, well, you know what, go for a year. Do something.
We're going to keep your documents here. Come back in a year and start your first year.
I said a year three times for no reason.
Sorry.
I went to China because I had this opportunity, again, that arose a word.
I think so.
It has arisen from a competition.
So when I was in high school, I did these international competitions called Han Yixiao, which is Chinese Bridge in Mandarin.
And those are competitions that are held in China and they're televised.
And it's, you know, they get all these kids from all the countries to compete who knows Mandarin the best.
So I did that twice and the second time as a team, we got second place.
And yeah, the prize was to go to, so we had a scholarship each of us to go to China for a year, any university we want,
or any university that would accept us to do a year long course of Mandarin Chinese.
So what I ended up doing is like, well, I have the scholarship. I can use it.
It could be my gap year kind of thing. I will still be studying, but I will use this year to advance my Mandarin and see what I want to do next.
And I'm really glad I did that.
At the age of 17, I was very wise in terms of what I was envisioning for myself.
And yeah, I ended up going to Beijing with two of my friends.
I did this as an advanced Mandarin course, but also I didn't tell anyone because all of my family was expecting me to come back to Mugimo and continue my studies.
But I secretly applied to Tsinghua University to the art school that they have within the university.
But that's how you've decided that art is something you'll be pursuing.
I think whatever path I went on, art just dragged me back every single time.
But I didn't apply to painting or any of the visual art disciplines. I applied to do fashion design.
So it was fashion and textiles.
Something that was familiar because now I realize, you know, especially my mom's side of family were all in the textile industry for many reasons.
You know, it was Pakistan, one of the biggest industries.
So I realized that maybe because I was always around these kind of ideas and concepts of textiles and all these sewing machines and this and that,
I felt like something I would know.
And because I also painted on fabric and all.
So I applied and I got into art school at the same time.
It was crazy.
I did.
We didn't want to pay for our studies.
Nobody wants to. Everyone wants a scholarship.
So there's this Chinese government scholarship scheme for international students where you can apply and if you get it, it pays for your tuition,
pays for your accommodation, your health insurance, it pays your stipend every month.
It's perfect.
You're sorted.
But the problem was that in Russia,
these quotas, they're given to individual embassies in every country and then the embassies decide what to do.
And then in Russia, the quotas are all given to the Russian Ministry of Education and the Russian Ministry doesn't want to give these quotas to people to do their bachelors or masters.
They sort of keep them to give them to exchange students.
Right.
So you're not able to access those if you want to do your full education in China, which was a shame.
And me again, at 17 or 18 years old, being a very clueless but very brave and cocky person,
I just, I went home to my parents for the holidays in the winter and I was like, well, when does the embassy open?
And I just went to the Chinese embassy at 9am on a random Wednesday.
I just stood under the gate and just rang the bell for like 15 minutes until they opened the door.
And they were like, what do you want?
I was like, hi, I would love to discuss the possibility of getting a scholarship.
As you do, apparently, when I was 17, I thought that was how world works.
And, you know, it did work out because eventually they summoned a guy who was responsible for all the education stuff at the embassy.
And he recognized me because I was doing all these competitions.
Right.
I was like, oh, you're that girl.
So we had this conversation, he was like, well, I'll see what we can do.
Maybe we have some extra quotas and stuff.
And yeah, I ended up getting an opportunity to apply, not through the Ministry of Education in Russia, but directly through the embassy.
It didn't mean we got a free ticket.
We still had to apply and go through the entire process.
But all three of us got grants in the end.
And like I did my BA in China.
And again, returning to the subject of me, why I was talking about this is because I could completely leave the environment I was in and find myself in a new environment with new people.
I was able to reinvent myself and actually become the personfully that I became long before that.
But I was finally able to show it.
What qualities do you think one should have to be able to do what you did to move to a completely different place and to find yourself?
The eldest daughter syndrome.
What's that?
It's hyperindependence.
Hyperindependence, ability to solve any crisis in seconds, always having Plan B plan C, feeling extreme responsibility for everything, having a savior complex.
It's all the qualities you have.
To some extent, yes.
And all these qualities help you to this date?
They help me, but they also hinder me sometimes.
Like how?
Like the savior complex.
Okay.
I always wanted to help people, even if they don't need help.
And not because I want to get some kind of benefit from it.
I genuinely want to help.
I genuinely want to help, but sometimes people don't need it.
That's a backfire sometimes?
Not that I can think of, not really.
But I think the...
Why is it that?
Just a very general downside, I think, which is not very terrible.
It affects you mentally a little bit when you have too much of it, is that you genuinely help people.
But then sometimes you don't get the gratitude that maybe you expect in return, and that sort of makes you feel a bit disappointed.
But again, it's not the same as expecting some kind of benefits in return.
And I think it's a very internal thing that I just have to work through.
That's it.
So you are in China, you started studying textiles, right?
Fashion design.
Fashion design, sorry.
How did it go?
For the first two years, it was great.
It was interesting.
I was having lots of fun.
Because the thing is, it was also...
So it was an art academy within a big comprehensive university.
So imagine Harvard or MIT having an art school inside.
So it was like a similar thing, because Tsinghua University, they call it the MIT of China,
it's just more focused on STEM-related subjects.
Although they've got a great humanities school as well.
So I got to do not just my art stuff, but I got to take classes from different departments and meet all kinds of different people.
There was this class where I did sort of competitive air rifle.
It was a thing, it was a class that you could pick within the sports.
It's an Olympic discipline.
And the most bizarre thing to me is that I would go to the class and then have this little air rifle,
and then try to...it was a 10 meters air rifle.
And then right next to me would be this literal Olympic champion.
Because Olympic champions, when they become champions at the age of 16 and 17,
they still then go on to universities and they go to the good universities because they have the credentials.
They get extra points.
So I would be doing my little wobbly, sort of not too sure how to fire this.
And then next to me would be an Olympic champion who's like doing her thing.
So it was quite an interesting environment to be in.
But then the first two years you said were good.
The other two years were also great.
But what happened is I realized I didn't like fashion design.
I was like, this is commercial and I want to tell stories.
Back to storytelling.
I want to be...I want to do weird things.
I want to create these weird sculptures.
I want to make wearable art that will still be costume-like,
but maybe tell...have a narrative within it,
or maybe will evolve or maybe will transform during whatever,
if it's a performance and it's a performance.
What is that coming from?
I mean, trying to do something weird and different.
Or wanting to do something weird and different.
Is it not because you were feeling different growing up in Taiwan and Russia?
Or am I going too deep with my analysis?
I don't know if it's that connected.
Maybe it wasn't about trying to be different for the sake of being different.
It was just me understanding that fashion design is a bit boring to me personally.
You mentioned it's too commercial. Why is it bad?
It is good for some people.
When I say it was too commercial, I'm not saying,
oh, it brings me too much money. How horrible.
I mean, there are certain restrictions within the spectrum of creativity
that you can exercise when you're doing fashion design.
And then the spectrum is much smaller when you do fashion design
because it still has to be commercially viable.
So you have to be able to sell things.
You can do couture, but it's really hard,
and you have to get there through all kinds of means as well.
So I didn't like my spectrum being so limited, and I wanted to open it up.
And I really loved theatre, and I loved history and historical pieces.
In a way, I liked using materials to show things that are written on paper.
So reading between the lines and finding some themes
and maybe gestures or maybe postures to then recreate within a costume.
So one of my first projects that I actually did that was inspired by 100 Years of Solitude by Marcus.
Because it's one of my favourite books.
But it's not the one that I'm going to recommend.
Because everyone knows it anyway.
And it was focused on this figure of Ursula, who was the matron of the family.
And the transformation of her being this young woman
and becoming this ancient lady who carried the weight of the entire family.
So I tried to show that through costume.
And this is what was my gateway into doing more theatrical things.
And I just came up to my tutors when I was in year three or something.
And I was like, okay, so can I do theatre? Can I do costumes?
And they were like, whatever. Do whatever you want.
And so I ended up doing that.
And I was doing an internship at NCPA, which is the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing.
It was quite a well-known place. It's right on the Tiananmen Square.
It looks like a blob. We call it... we call it... the drop.
So that was an insane first place to do my internship in.
Because my first opera that I worked on was an opera with a placido d'amingo.
It must be a big deal. I don't know the name. I'm not quite an opera person.
Yeah, if you know the three tenors.
So you had the Chana Poveroti.
Yes.
Big deal. Very famous guy. Very famous operatic singer.
We became friends for the production because... I don't know why.
He just thought I looked different from everyone else because...
So you do?
Maybe because of that.
And he... just like when he was about to go on stage he'd be like, yo, how's the day going?
Anyway.
So that was... that left a huge impression on me.
And it was also the opera that ended up really liking and doing a few other productions of in different capacity.
Which is Macbeth by Verdi.
And yeah, that's how I sort of got into this backstage world of doing costume.
And you loved it.
Yeah, it was... it was a world full of wonders, you know?
It was like going into this beautiful... like you walk in and then you go through these corridors and suddenly there's a huge fish sort of coming out.
And it's a prop. It's a prop from some... but it's huge and it's sparkly.
And then you go further and there's all these beautiful costumes from like the Elizabethan period.
And then you keep going and then suddenly there's actors rehearsing like fencing and stuff.
And then... oh yeah, one of the first costumes that I helped make was... were reanimated corpses.
Of soldiers that were dead on the battlefield.
That was fun. That was a lot of fun because you have to actually think, oh, how do I make a costume of a reanimated corpse that will be obvious from, you know, 100 meters away?
Because when you do an opera, everyone's on the stage really far away.
Then you've got the orchestra pit and then, you know, then you've got all the rich people who have all the money to sit in the front.
And then as a student, I was always, you know...
At the back. So...
Abinorathers.
You need to be aiming for those sitting at the back.
Yeah, so how do I make it clear that those weird people brazing suddenly from the stage are reanimated corpses?
So that was fun. That was a great challenge.
The theatre costumes must be quite different to the film...
Very different. We can talk about it.
We can. We can talk about anything we want.
Because with film, what you want to really highlight is the details.
The costumes don't really need to be durable because, you know, when you finish filming...
It's cool.
You can be reused for something else, but it's not the priority.
But with theatre, because the play runs for a while, has to be durable.
You cannot really pay attention to details because most likely nobody will see them.
But then you have to be conscious of how do you make it look still very striking and effective from a very far distance.
So there's different priorities when you work on those.
So costume design for the theatre, is that what you focused on the second two years of your academic career?
In a way. I couldn't actually do theatre within my studies, but I would work with stories and sort of create things around that.
So the costumes, they never ended up on stage and they were not really made for the stage.
But I guess you could say that they were more inventive fashion.
I don't want to say couture because it was not couture, but what you imagine on a runway.
When you see all these pieces that you can't really wear in real life. So this is the stuff that I did.
And my graduation collection was inspired by King Lear.
Because I was also working on a production of King Lear at the same time as an assistant.
And I thought it would be a nice way to tie those two together.
So you finished your studies, you are still in China, but you decided not to stay in China?
I decided not to stay. I wanted...
You speak the language, you are doing cool stuff there.
I think there were several reasons. One of the reasons was it wasn't as easy to get a permission to stay if you worked in the arts.
As it is everywhere.
And I think I wanted to get more hands-on experience within this industry, which is theatre.
And specifically, let's say, western theatre, or the western tradition of dramatic drama.
Dramatic arts.
And you know, Russian theatre is really well known.
And at the time it was booming. It was really interesting, it was happening at the time, 2017.
So I was like, oh, I can go back and get more experience just doing that.
And I did. So I went back to Moscow again, to my parents.
And I got this job at a theatre costume studio, I guess.
It wasn't connected to any theatre, but it would work.
It would be like a contractor, I guess, for a bunch of theatres. So I got to lead costume production for Bolshoi theatre, for Stanislavskiy Nimerovich with Aynchenko musical theatre.
All kinds of different... Because Moscow's got like 200 theatres.
So I did a lot of that. It was really difficult. It was probably the...
I would want to say the worst, because it wasn't the worst in the year of my life.
It was very demanding. And it was a very violent restructuring of my life.
Because you come back from China where you were used to one thing and then you're back into Russia.
And you're not studying at a school, but you're actually doing a real adult job.
And then you realise that, oh, in this industry there are hierarchies.
There's ageism. People's attitudes are different to you if you're young.
Because they think you have no knowledge or experience, which is true to some extent, but I have different experience.
Is it industry specific thing, or is it just in Russia, this kind of...
I don't know. I think it's not just Russia as well. It's like a lot of different countries.
I'm not saying that it's just exclusive to Russia.
But this is something that I faced, even within the studio. I came in as this technical specialist, technical artist.
And those are people who have been doing this for years.
It took me a long time to earn their trust.
Because they're like, who's this 23-year-old who's just bossing us around?
So you had to prove yourself.
Yeah. That was the most demanding part. And I was paid peanuts.
Not paid very well.
But I guess I was paid with experience.
Because that really gave me a lot of knowledge in how this whole backstage and production thing works.
And how long have you been doing that in Moscow before you've decided to come to the UK?
So a bit more than a year. But I felt like seven years.
That felt like an eternity.
And I think at some point, the reason I came to the UK is because at some point I realized that this kind of profession that I'm doing doesn't really lead anywhere.
So you're just kind of like doing the same thing.
Because I was seeing women who were doing the same thing as I did for years.
And they were still in the same kind of position.
And I didn't want it to be like that. And I wanted to do my own art as well.
And I didn't have the confidence to do it.
I didn't know where to get the confidence to do it.
And I didn't have the people around me who would give me this confidence or in a community where I could share my ideas.
I did not have that.
So I just felt like I needed to have a goal in my life.
And just for funsies.
I don't think it would sound ridiculous, but just wanting to have a goal and wanting to have something to look forward to.
I decided to just try and apply for universities in the UK.
Why UK?
Because I spoke the language.
And I...
US?
Huh?
US is an option.
US is too expensive.
Okay. So it's a financial decision.
Well, I just knew that if I go into the US, then definitely no way I could go.
The programs that I applied to in the UK, they were still very expensive.
But compared to the US, they were cheap.
Right.
Which is already a ridiculous thing to say.
So you didn't have any other links in the UK? I don't know, family, friends?
Well, yes. I have extended family here.
But that wasn't another reason.
No, it wasn't really a reason because I have extended family in the US and way more people.
And also not extended like quite close family.
I think there were several reasons.
So financial is one.
Two, I really wanted to go to Central St. Martins because coming...
Especially coming from a fashion background, you know, you always hear about how amazing that school is and how amazing...
Like I would follow a lot of current students at the time on Instagram and see what they're doing.
And they all seemed really appealing.
Even though I didn't want to do fashion, I knew that there were other disciplines I could apply to.
Also, I think I like UK more because it's closer to the places that are important to me.
Geographically.
Closer to Europe, which I find personally more enticing.
And also, health care is a big thing.
So there's a lot of reasons.
And I've never been to London before that and no idea and just the idea of London was also very alluring.
But I didn't think I would get in.
I was just doing it because I was like, you know, I got to have something to look forward to, even if it's a rejection.
At least I tried.
And I applied and then two months passed by and nobody's inviting me for an interview.
Well, that's it. Well, you know, try to do something else, I guess.
And then suddenly in April, so I applied in February in April, I get a letter saying congratulations, you've been accepted.
Sality interviews.
Without interview.
So I guess they liked my stuff and they liked my proposal.
It was a masters and the masters was in performance design practice.
So it was adjacent to what I was doing, but going into more experimental areas.
So what I was doing is more like technical costume and production, maybe not really going outside of those boundaries.
But this course allowed me to actually experiment with my ideas and work with different people because the great part of the course was that they brought in people from different backgrounds.
So, you know, I was coming from this fashion costume background, there were people who did sound design, there was a theatre director, there was a choreographer.
There's all kinds of people.
And what they did is just smash us all together and said, do work.
And that really made me leave this cocoon and I guess stop being self-conscious about the things I have to say.
Because I never thought the things I have to say would be interesting to anyone.
But this course gave me the opportunity to voice those things and get feedback.
And when the feedback was good, it would encourage me.
If the feedback was bad, it would encourage me even more.
Because I would be like, oh, okay, this is something I need to work on and I can improve and see what other directions I can work in.
So the feedback is important in, especially developing in your area.
Because many people would be scared to put out their story, their character, their work out to the public scrutiny.
But you are saying that you need to do it because of that.
Because that helps you to develop, grow.
Well, it really depends on what kind of feedback.
Because it's one thing to post a video on YouTube and get a bunch of negative comments that don't really have any substance.
That's not the kind of feedback I mean.
How do you filter out the good feedback from the bad feedback?
Well, you mean good and bad in terms of quality?
The feedback that contributes to your growth, yes.
Okay, so there's positive and negative feedback.
I guess this is how I should have framed it.
So what I meant was positive and negative feedback.
And then in terms of quality of feedback, there's good and bad feedback.
Useful and useless.
It has to be constructive.
So what I learned as well, because every time we would have this opportunity to present a piece of work,
a little sketch of something that we want to do in terms of performance or video.
And then the entire course and maybe someone else would be there in the audience.
And yeah, it would be like a crit.
Where after you finish, everyone voices their opinions, maybe say things that worked for them that didn't work.
Maybe some proposals as to how do you want to develop that.
And you can always see if feedback is constructive because it analyzes and gives you a possible solution.
Non-constructive feedback is like, oh, I just didn't like it.
Yes, criticizing for the sake of criticizing.
I just thought it wasn't accessible.
But then if you don't explain why it wasn't accessible, then it's bad feedback.
If you explain, oh, because I thought that it wasn't accessible because you were using these words that maybe only 1% of people would know
because they read this very specific book.
This is completely made up right now.
This is not something that happened to me.
Or like, oh, you made the space too dark so people couldn't actually see so maybe next time consider lighting a bit more.
Like these kind of things.
And also narrative wise, and there's different kinds.
For me, I think I really wanted to get feedback on narrative and also on how much the subject actually resonates and how the things work together.
Yeah, so this is when I actually started developing my very first thing, where I started looking at my background and the stories and the video that you mentioned earlier.
That's what I was actually going to ask.
A lot of things happen, like Moscow, Taiwan, China, back to Moscow, now London.
Where is Uzbekistan and Uzbekness within that story?
Oh yeah, I forgot to say.
When I was in school, every summer, I would go to school.
So you would go to Uzbekistan to your grandparents, I'm assuming.
Yeah, hang out with them.
Uzbekistan was always there.
It was always there.
You were feeling Uzbek or Russian or Chinese?
I think for, okay, so for a long time I would tell people that I'm Russian just because it was easier.
Right.
And I technically grew up in Moscow and Russian is my first language now.
It's like the main language I speak.
Not my first language, but like my mother tongue.
So for the sake of just simplifying things, people would be like, oh, where are you from?
I went from Russia because my family's in Russia.
And people know Moscow, like Tashkent or Uzbekistan is not something that many people would know.
So, but then I stopped doing that.
You know, because, and I stopped doing that actually a while ago, maybe in 2018, 2019.
Because now I was going into this research and actually trying to find ways where I can explore this identity.
Because what I was interested in is that it was identities and it wasn't necessarily just, you know, my Uzbek identity or whatever identity.
We were doing a lot of work around sort of this.
So I was working with the friend who was from Bulgaria and we were looking at sort of identities within that region.
And we were doing lots of work with like local communities in London when I was a student.
So there was a lot of these things that were overlapping and I think the tools that I gained from that, I would apply onto researching my own background and identity and trying to understand again, what is the sense of home?
How do I have, you know, like, what is home for me?
Because spoiler, I don't think I know where home is yet.
It's a process of exploring.
Yeah, maybe I'll just never feel like home anywhere and it's also fine.
That is actually another question I was going to ask.
Why identities are important? Why do someone need to know their identity where they belong to?
Is it not from one hand the reason of being divisive where people are kind of clinging onto their identities?
And as you have experienced in Russia, kind of lifting out those who don't match their identity, can we not just be the people of Earth and not identify with certain regions for certain cultures?
How do you shed all the context that you were brought up in?
Like, I don't know. Again, as a person who lives literally in so many places, and I could say that I'm a person of Earth,
but I still don't feel like I can say that because I don't know the struggles of people in, you know, in Central Africa.
I don't know the struggles of people in different areas. And I cannot represent them, but they're also on Earth in a way.
I have to go far. In Uzbekistan, people identify themselves as being from Tashkent versus being from other regions or here.
People being like English versus Scottish versus Irish. And it's not always...
So you're talking more about national identity.
What I'm looking at is not really national identities. It's more, I guess, social and cultural and gender, those kind of things, which sort of blur the idea of nation, per se,
because like, I'm not looking at me being from a specific area. I look at myself, how I engage with the cultural heritage that was given,
and how that cultural heritage is linked to the other things that I experience in all these different countries, and how this hybrid identity emerges.
But nationality and religion is part of the social identity, isn't it?
I guess, well, yeah.
I think what I'm really interested in is looking at these identities that have emerged post-independence right now in Uzbekistan, let's say.
And it's a whole tangle of things. Again, you know, people identify that they're from here, but they do this and that.
And a lot of people try to, for example, reject the Soviet past, or they're trying to reject certain things.
And I think what's interesting for me is to actually not reject any of that and accept the fact that these identities that we have right now,
they're not broken or they're not incorrect, like the fact that you grew up in Tashkent, where you don't speak Uzbek, is not necessarily a mistake.
It is a fact that happened, and it is a product of things that happened in history.
And it is just a new identity that you need to accept in order to move forward, and you need to celebrate that.
It's not something you have to fix. You can. You can learn Uzbek, but it's not going to be fixing your identity.
You can learn Uzbek because you want to. And I don't know if this is clear enough.
It is, yeah. It makes sense. So you're doing masters in London, and you're starting, not starting, you're more focused on exploring your identity and your roots.
Yeah, I think this is where this whole thing started.
Yes.
Yeah, I just got the confidence to really explore that, maybe also slightly outside of the context of Russia again.
Because I think maybe I was slightly scared to do that in Russia initially. Maybe I was scared of people not understanding or thinking, oh, this is not important because it's about Central Asia.
So London being multicultural, as you said earlier, has triggered it.
And also not very, like not a lot of people know about Central Asia here. So there is this freedom to really talk about it and share.
There's interest as well. People do genuinely express their interest when you talk about it.
There was interest, yeah. And also, even if there wasn't interest, the things I was doing, because I was doing a one-woman show, I was developing a one-woman show about migration and moving between the cities
and sort of looking at the cities and sort of maybe creating the characters out of those cities.
So I was going through exactly the way we're going through right now in the podcast, through all these cities that I've lived in.
And there was this transforming set that came out of a suitcase that I built and built up and then put pieces together and turned into Tetris.
And it's like a whole, whole very inventive thing. And I would show it and even the people who didn't know about Uzbekistan and didn't care about Uzbekistan,
they could still feel a connection because in its specificity, the experience is still quite universal because, again, we live in a globalized world.
Everyone's been a migrant at some point. So I've gotten this feedback. We're like, oh, we still can connect to a lot of the things that you say,
even though you talk about these things that we don't have no idea about. So that gave me this encouragement.
And I was working on it for about a year and a half. And then a month before the premiere, so the premiere was on 22nd of April 2020.
A month before that, everything gets canceled, obviously, because of the premiere.
So you didn't have a chance to...
Never showed it.
Okay.
Never showed it. It was an hour-long show. The set still exists somewhere. I don't know where it is because I left it, I think, with my friend or something.
How do you feel about it?
The fact that I never showed it. I'm glad.
Why?
Because now looking at the script and the things that I did, it was all still quite naive, which is understandable because it was the first thing I ever did about this subject.
And maybe at the time it would have been fine, but it was one of those things when I look back and I think, oh, it's not a bad thing that I didn't do it.
Not because it was so offensive or intolerant. There was none of that. It was just still, I think, very...
Immature? Not immature.
Not immature, but...
He's barely.
Raw.
No, right.
Not right, yeah. It wasn't ripe enough, the subject. It was getting there.
And the video that you saw was actually me just filming in my friend's kitchen.
Kadir Iwasrit.
And it's a five minute video, which is kind of... It's not an excerpt from the show, but it's kind of inspired by the show.
I've seen the VR version of that as well, which is on your website, and a lot of the stories are initially told in that version. Was it kind of done during the COVID period as well?
So your story that you wanted to play as a real production as a world as this kind of video eventually that you did?
So the videos weren't meant to exist.
So the pandemic hit and we couldn't do the shows, but we still had to be great at somehow, because it was a master's degree.
So I ended up recording the whole show, just like an audio play, into a microphone just like this.
So I had this hour long recording, and then I submitted all of that and the script and the drawings on the website as well. You see the 3D...
So on the... Yeah, you see on my website the 3D renders of the set and how it would have been if it happened.
And I think in a way it was an exercise for me to see what I can do digitally, because at that time I wasn't working a lot digitally.
But we were all locked in and I was like, I've got to do something. Better see if I can. I could challenge myself.
So I turned to these media that I was interested in but didn't have enough time to explore and now I have all the time in the world.
Because they're all stuck in doors.
Yeah, so because I made the 3D models I was able to create these VR videos and use some of the excerpts of the recording that I had to put it in.
And I also submitted for grading and stuff and I was like, oh well, I'll put it on my website as well.
And this is where I started also experimenting with AR filters, which is also on the website.
That page has not changed for four years. So it's still the same as it was four years ago. Maybe I should maybe edit it.
But yeah, I was locked in and this is where I really started thinking, well, I can't do actual costume anymore.
And it was a period, it was a very strange period where everyone was doing zoom performances.
And I also, I'm guilty of that, I did a zoom performance about the RLC.
Not really about the RLC, but about cotton picking.
Okay.
And the RLC and it was a zoom performance where I was in zoom and there were two cameras, sort of from two different angles.
And I was ridiculous. I'm glad that no recording would exist.
That's what I was going to ask.
I don't think I was doing my research and I didn't see that.
No.
I wouldn't have put it online. I mean, it was fine. It worked. It was the concept was cool.
I nearly poisoned myself.
But it was cool because what I did is I got all these blue t-shirts from a charity shop.
And I was just telling a story. I was telling stories of, you know, my mom as a teenager going to the fields and picking cotton
and how she was talking about it and all these different things and some anecdotes and this and that.
And then sort of slowly going into the more environmentalist narrative and the drying rivers and all of that.
And as I was doing it, I was kind of pretending to wash the t-shirts.
But then when you're in zoom, you don't know what it's not water. It's actually bleach.
So it's like water with bleach.
And I was sort of washing it and hanging it up.
So from the other angle, you could see how the t-shirts through my narrative would turn from blue to like,
to white, desert color.
So like the color of this table.
So it was like a metaphor, you know, all blue becoming deserts and all of that.
But all the bleach.
But all the bleach and I was like dying by the end of it because I was inhaling the whole thing.
But yeah, that was the stuff we were doing.
But then I was like, I like costume and I want to try and see if I can do digital costume.
And how do you put a digital costume on?
Oh, augmented reality.
So I started learning that.
I was just really throwing myself into these things.
And what really helped is it was also time for all these online residencies.
So artist residencies, as we know, an artist gets invited, they get a studio, they work in a specific area.
Something happens, maybe a show or maybe not.
But again, nobody can travel.
So these art institutions start coming up with online residencies where you participate online.
You have all these talks and classes and you work in groups or maybe not.
And you present an idea and so on.
So these things happened as well.
Some of them happened in a program called Mozilla Hubs, which unfortunately, as of end of May this year,
has been shut down.
It was a great platform.
I used it a lot for workshops as well afterwards.
But it's a VR platform, like a social media almost, social platform where you could go into a 3D world,
either in a headset or on your computer or on your phone, and sort of exist in the social environment but online.
It was completely free and you could build your worlds for free.
So we're using that a lot.
So that got me into this immersive technology world.
And then I never thought I would be able to earn money from that because I was just playing around.
But then around end of autumn 2020, I got my first gig in like,
oh, we need to make an augmented reality filter for the New Year's.
We're going to pay you this amount of money.
Do you want to do it? I was like, oh yeah, if you pay me.
And then one thing led to another and I suddenly had a career in augmented reality.
In some way, COVID was a good thing for you to try out different things to explore.
It's a horrible thing to say.
I always hesitate to say things this way because obviously COVID is a tragedy.
Tragedy. My closest friend always says,
projedy instead of prodigy.
And I am now sort of, it's plaguing me in the same way now.
I say, tragedy instead of tragedy.
Obviously COVID itself is a massive kind of tragedy, as you said.
But it was a different time and it allowed people to try different things.
Yeah, if you're lucky to be healthy, yes.
I am not, okay.
Maybe I'm not complaining as much because I didn't actually spend a long time in lockdown.
So I was in lockdown in the UK.
And then I decided not to extend my visa because of COVID because there was really no work and it was still expensive to be moved.
And I was just fresh out of my MA.
So it's not like I was going to get an amazing job anyway.
So I decided to go back to Moscow to my mom, to my dad.
So I stayed there and what happened in Moscow that didn't happen in a lot of different places is that very soon in Moscow,
everyone just pretended that COVID did not exist.
I think similar things happen in Uzbekistan as well.
Yeah, so people were working.
I was going to different meetings, networking, trying to get contacts, trying to get a job, trying to find a way to survive, trying to do things.
And I managed through that to find some gigs.
As I said, the augmented reality, little gig that led to other things, I did a couple of designs for place through that.
So the year and a half that I was there after I came back from London were quite fruitful because I was, as you say, in Russian,
in every single word.
We need to find out.
We need to Google it.
I'll Google it and let you know.
I think I will understand what you mean.
Be persistent, let's say.
Yeah, I was trying to do a lot of things at the same time and trying to sort of find where I can be useful or where I can apply the knowledge that I have
because I had a huge experience in all these different fields because this path towards doing what I'm doing right now wasn't obviously very straightforward.
So you were talking about moving back to UK, sorry, from UK to Moscow.
You said you were lucky because you didn't stay in lockdown quite a long time.
Yeah, I did get COVID because of that, unfortunately.
But it wasn't very terrible.
So earlier you said one of the reasons you decided to move out of Moscow to UK is you couldn't find your community in Moscow.
Coming back to Moscow, did you manage to find that community?
To some extent.
I came back a different person.
I was way more confident about my own work and the way I present myself.
And I think, unfortunately, as well, telling people that I just did my masters in England, just in their eyes, seems like something...
Changed their perspective.
Yeah.
What was I trying to say?
Oh yeah, so I came back and I did find the people that were interested in what I was doing and I was interested in what they were doing and I was great.
And also I think in these couple of years some attitudes have changed because, for example, new buzzwords started to come up in different areas.
Words like decolonisation.
And that, again, has changed and maybe developed more interest in the relationships that were, like, inter, I guess, national relationships that were in that of a priority before.
So this is when I kind of, initially when I came back, I came back with an idea of maybe I can stage my play in Russia.
And there were some people who were interested in that and that was already something that I found curious because, oh, suddenly there were people who were interested in me talking about being in Pakistan,
which is not something that would have been of interest really.
Although, I might be wrong because I have a friend who is, he did a play in 2013, which was called Uzbek.
Right.
I think I've heard about it.
I have not seen it, but it was about this experience of a migrant.
So there was interest around that, but I think a much more, much bigger kind of interest and, in a way, positive interest.
I think, like, curiosity that emerged.
And then I did another project, so I applied because I was working around these subjects anyway.
And then, so the play didn't work out.
I was fine.
Absolutely fine.
I was not sad about it.
But I was developing these ideas further and there was an open call for competition for artists, young artists for projects.
And, like, if you win, you become one of the 12 finalists that get to do an exhibition and all of that.
So I was like, well, may as well apply with this idea that I had that was developing from all the things that I was researching.
And it was about working with communities, it was working with women and also women with experience of migration.
And how do we bring people together and co-create?
And through this co-creation, how do we explore our hopes and dreams, but also fears, and also how do we talk about the things that we don't get to talk about for different reasons?
In a safe space.
So that's what I did.
And there was a project that I became a finalist, which was great.
And again, it showed me that there was this kind of curiosity and interest and something that people wanted to be shown in public sort of spaces.
And what I ended up doing was, so for the exhibition, you don't do the full project, but you do sort of a proposal version of it.
So after that, they give you either a grant or something, an opportunity to continue doing it.
So I ended up getting a grant.
But this first iteration, I worked with several women of different ages, I think the ages were like between 16 and 50.
All from Central Asia, not from a single country, but actually there was.
There was every country except for Jiggy-san.
They all came from Central Asia to Russia for different reasons.
Some came as babies, some came to study, some came for work and all of that.
And within these workshops, I was also working with, I guess, a trauma therapist.
There was a psychologist in the sessions as well who was helping me to mediate all of that because we were making things and doing different exercises.
Some performative, some maybe more art therapeutic. Art therapy.
And then when you tell the stories, you start telling the things that you don't necessarily talk about with your, even with your clothes ones.
I saw the clips and people were emotional when they were talking about the stories.
You watched the video?
Yes.
Damn.
Flattered.
So, yeah, girls would cry and it was so emotional for everyone.
And in the end, we sort of co-created these different pieces and partially they were displayed in the exhibition.
And also from all the narratives that came together.
Mostly for the lack of time, but my idea is that in the future that would change.
I sort of found, again, reading between the lines and looking for similarities in terms of posture, gesture, and things that constrained the women physically, let's say.
There was a lot of talk about, oh, I feel very limited in my space, I don't feel like I can take up a lot of space.
My arms always feel very constrained.
I can't sort of do anything with them because I feel like they always have to be close to my body and that reflects in my behavior and so on.
There's a lot of that.
And of course, we can go into analyzing whether it's gendered socialization or whatever it is.
So I was taking these physical manifestations of what they were saying and trying to build this wearable piece that would be, I guess, an amalgamation of all of these experiences together.
So the costume that came out, it was this piece that was visually sort of put together using the drawings and the little sculptures that they made.
But then when a person wears this piece, their arms are sort of constrained in the air and they can't put them down.
So you're sort of in this position the whole time and that limits your movement and you have to exist within this limitation.
So it's a way to sort of convey an embodied memory or like an embodied collective memory.
And this is something that I've carried on all the way to the Biennale because the sculptures that you see in the Biennale also have the same kind of idea behind it.
So initially this project was meant to happen in cycles.
So it's not a one-off thing.
You know, I would do a new cycle with new people who create a new costume all together and there would be a third cycle.
So it's like an ongoing research with people coming in and out, maybe staying and so on.
But unfortunately due to...
Infamous events in Russia?
I was not able to continue.
And it's a shame because it was really a moment where there was definitely a quite an interest in engaging with Central Asian culture.
And you know, this complex relationship that exists between people who migrate from Central Asia to Russia for obvious reasons.
And then their relationship with the local community and so on.
There were some plays coming out made by actors who came from Central Asia talking about their experiences and getting really popular and getting great reviews.
So this subject was sort of building up and there was promise.
But then, you know, things can change like this.
So I was not able to continue this project and I unfortunately do not think this project can exist outside of the context of Russia.
Because it's very specifically about...
So it's not something you can continue from here comparing the experiences of migrant women who migrate to the UK and compare it with their experiences in Russia?
I could still do it. It would be a different project.
Because that one was specifically about this sort of post and new colonial relationship that exists.
So things happened. Events that all of us know happened in Russia and you decided again to come back to UK?
I went straight to Uzbekistan.
You went to Uzbekistan?
I realized that for many reasons.
I could not stay and I just got the first flight to Uzbekistan.
So I went to Uzbekistan.
So you went back to Uzbekistan and is that when you have decided to be a founder of the collective?
Not necessarily. I went to Uzbekistan thinking that I just need to get away and I did not want to do anything related to art because it just felt meaningless.
For quite a few months I was just sitting there thinking...
There is no point in doing what I'm doing because...
Why?
Well, you know, when you're in that state of shock, I guess, over the events and you kind of see a bigger picture and you're like,
well, how is my art going to change the world? In the moment, you think that. And I was quite happy.
I sort of formulated for myself. At that point I was in Tashkent.
I was like, I am happy doing educational things. I love sharing the things that I know.
I was doing some workshops around augmented reality. I was doing workshops around virtual reality.
I was feeling really happy contributing to the local community in Tashkent, which I wasn't very familiar with.
I knew some people through Instagram. I knew some people because that's how all of us connect in the art world through Instagram.
So I had these connections and some people that I knew from Russia also came to Uzbekistan, even though they did not have any connection to the country.
A lot in the state.
But mostly it was a time for me to really familiarize myself with the community and meet people and talk to people.
And one of my realizations was that, you know, I was asking all these questions for half of my life.
And then I come here and I meet people who have very different upbringings and very different backgrounds for me.
But they're asking the same questions and I sort of found this connection in there.
It was a realization that gave me a lot of hope in a way of like finding my community.
I was sort of introduced to this group of people. It was quite a big group.
Like the artistic community is not very big, I would say.
And everyone sort of knows each other and people were like already working together doing things.
Like on the basis of like there was one, three, nine gallery, for example.
Documentary center. Documentary center. Other places.
People are already existing and mixing. And I sort of came in as a South Sider and I was really accepted.
I don't know why they accepted me. But it was a wonderful thing to have in this really strange time that we were all going through.
In a way, there was already this synergy that was existing between all of these wonderful people, these wonderful women especially.
I think we all just needed to come together and sit down and be like, this is what we want to do.
We're ready. We want to try. We have all these things that we want to achieve.
We don't know how. We can try and see.
Because we care about this and that. We care about women's rights.
We care about women working in creative industries having their own voice and not being silenced.
We care about women being safe. We care about having these cross-border relationships with other groups, maybe in neighboring countries.
Because still, the context in Central Asia, we're all kind of interconnected despite our differences.
So we formulated all these things and we decided to try and create a collective.
Alive and kicking. It's been a bit more than two years, I think, we formed in April 2022.
And in the beginning, it was slow, of course. You kind of figure out things and some of the members changed.
There was somebody left. We're still really great friends. Somebody came in.
It was this moment of shuffling and understanding how we can do things.
And I left to London afterwards. So how was I going to exist in that reality?
A lot of questions. But I think right now we're doing quite a few very interesting projects.
And I'm really excited about all of them.
Looking into the collective, Qizlar, feminism has come up a number of times.
And especially in Uzbekistan where the traditionalist layer of the society is quite strong,
do you think that feminism has perceived in our society is true spirit of feminism and why feminism is so misunderstood in our culture?
There's a lot of reasons for that. I think it's maybe the lack of proper resources that explain what feminism actually is about.
Perhaps there is desire for escape goat kind of word that can be blamed when something goes wrong.
You can easily blame things on feminism.
Your wives are divorcing you always because of feminism. It's easy to come up with this kind of escape goat.
There's some influence coming from the neighboring country as well where in media feminism is being equaled to extremism and terrorism and all of that.
Which is just the most ridiculous narrative because what we care about as a group is we want to have a voice, we want to have a choice,
and we want to be able to define ourselves with our own words.
One of our principles is nothing about us without us. We want people not to speak for us because our experiences are as valid.
Who would better represent our experiences than ourselves?
That is the first thing because if we talk about the creative sector, still it is quite male dominated and women are not given a lot of opportunities to express themselves on the media.
And if they do, then often it's met with a lot of negativity and so on.
So women are feeling quite restrained and restricted in what they can say.
Secondly, having a choice, again, just having the same number of choices as men do and not having any choices imposed on us.
So many opponents of feminism say that first of all it's foreign to our culture.
And second of all, they assume that feminism means equal rights to men and women in all areas, which means in some respect they consider it as if it's not physically possible
because obviously, biologically, men and women are different.
So if you go back to my first kind of point, do you believe that feminism is foreign to our culture?
Or do you think it is actually something that has existed maybe in different shape or name, but has always been part of who we are historically?
I don't feel I'm qualified enough to talk about this.
That's a good response.
There's other people who would be way better at responding.
There is a great book and some great researchers that we can link in the comments that talk about actually the position of the woman and also for example, the unveiling of women and how this has happened and all of that.
There's a lot of great resources, so if you're interested, we can give you those resources.
However, you mentioned equal rights and all of the everything.
I think the better way to say it is equal opportunities because it's about, again, having a choice.
So if you want to work as a metro train driver, you should have that opportunity.
It doesn't mean that now 50-50 women are forced to do that.
But for the longest time women just couldn't apply to this job, even if they really wanted to.
Imagine I'm just obsessed with trains.
I want to drive a train, but I cannot.
So it's about creating this opening and allowing women who are qualified and who want to be qualified to do that.
And then a lot of people bring up, oh, military service, or you want women to serve as well.
Well, if women were in charge, they wouldn't start wars.
That's the thing.
So maybe we wouldn't need military service at all.
I mean, this is very generalizing.
It's absolutely not in the reality of what we exist in.
But it is just not speaking for the people whose experience you know nothing about,
because this is a lot of times what's happening.
So what we're doing is trying to create these spaces where we can represent our own experiences by ourselves.
And in many ways, the opportunity to do the Venice Biennial and the National Pavilion was exactly that.
We had this incredible chance to talk about our own personal experiences and experiences of women in our community, young women,
and show that to people, to the international community, and not just international to the community of, you know,
it was like it's an essential age as well. And this is one of the things that we really strive for.
Of course, it cannot happen. I don't think it can happen as like, you know, one revolution, like, oh, now all women in charge.
It's a gradual development. And it's about education and it's about talking to each other and not being afraid to talk to each other.
And through these kind of conversations and discussions, people learn and they realize that it's not a scary thing.
And would you agree that the fact that people are now discussing about these topics in different forms,
even if they are opposing, which is triggering these discussions, is a good thing that eventually it will educate people,
it will kind of bring different perspectives to the topic?
Well, yeah, I guess discussing it. That's a great question. I don't know if bashing, discussions about bash feminism actually.
I guess if people read that and then they're like, oh, actually, I don't really, let me go check out some sources.
That probably happens. I don't know if that happens a lot.
Yeah, now there are quite a lot of young women who are trying to sort of generate knowledge about these subjects that are, that are successful.
For example, there's a wonderful collective of young women in Uzbekistan called Makal, which is newly formed, but they're amazing.
And what they're focusing on is the research collective. They're focusing on creating knowledge with the colonial and feminist perspective in Uzbek,
which is going to be an amazing resource for all of the young women and young men who want to get access to these things.
So they're translating text from English and from other languages into Uzbek, they're writing their own texts in Uzbek, so they're creating this wonderful,
they've only started, but it's going to be great, this wonderful database where people can access.
It's not for money, it's free.
A lot of interesting things are happening in Uzbekistan to kind of enlighten, educate people.
Just good.
Biennale, something that we haven't discussed, but I think we should.
For people who don't know what the Venice Biennale is, why is it a big deal?
So the Venice Biennale of art, being an Italian word, so I guess in English it's the biennial, Venice Biennale of art,
is a big event that happens in Venice and Italy every two years. Well, the art won't happen every two years,
and then on the other years it's the architecture of Biennale.
So the whole lab Biennale actually consists of so many events, so there's also theatre and music and other things.
But yeah, it's one of the biggest art events in the world, and it brings together in its main exhibition always around 3-400 artists from all parts of the world.
It's curated every time it's a different curator, and they curate the theme and all of that.
But besides that, there's also national participations, so countries with pavilion is where they show people,
not necessarily from the country, there's all kinds of different artists that they feel can represent the art of their nation.
And besides that, there's also collateral events, so a lot of other exhibitions happening at the same time.
Venice becomes this incredible place with more than 500 exhibitions.
This is an arbitrary number, but I feel like it's more than that. For good 6-7 months a year.
So it starts in April and ends in the end of November.
So this year it was the 60th anniversary?
60th, yeah.
60th anniversary.
I don't know if there's any significance in that.
Well, it's a round number.
Yeah, it looks good.
It's an anniversary, yeah.
And this is the second time Uzbekistan has participated with their national pavilion, and you have been commissioned to set up the exhibitions in the pavilion.
How did that happen?
So yeah, so you mentioned I was commissioned.
So the commissioner is the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Foundation.
And it was all under the curation as well of the Center for Contemporary Art in Tashkent.
So these are the main institutions that manage all of this.
And I was incredibly lucky.
I think I don't know how that happened.
But of course, I feel incredibly humbled and grateful for this opportunity.
I was contacted and I was offered this opportunity.
I think there was sort of a selection committee that was looking at different options and they ended up sort of asking if I would be interested.
And I think now when I think of the reasons that I was picked, it probably has to do...
One of the reasons it has to do with the theme of this year's biennial.
So there is general theme every year that all the exhibitors will follow.
And what was the theme of this year's biennial?
So the theme this year was called Foreigners Everywhere, which is by itself quite a controversial statement.
But it was actually sort of flipping this idea upside down, this phrase that you hear in a lot of maybe contexts that are not very friendly.
And actually highlighting the experiences of people, artists with experience of migration, artists from marginalized backgrounds, different sort of minorities, diasporos.
So these artists that exist sort of in between these borders and divisions and stuff.
And also, for example, in the main exhibition, there was a highlight on artists who have never participated in the biennial before.
So it was also about novelty and looking at the artists that were historically maybe unseen or overlooked.
So in a way, because again, I look at the topics of migration and displacement and identity and my work is about women, my work is about diaspora and all of that in a way that fits in the subject, the overall topic of the theme of the biennial.
And also, I believe maybe my background in, you know, scenography and working with spaces and working with narrative spaces, site-specific performances and exhibitions.
This is all the things that I've done because the space that you work with when you do the national pavilion of Uzbekistan, it's very tricky because it's huge.
It's a large warehouse space. The ceilings are like seven, eight meters tall. You've got about 30-something meters this side, about 20 meters this side.
Do the math yourself, it's huge. It's right sort of at the end of Arsenale, which used to be the docks, I think, and I think I read somewhere that this specific space was used to make sales for boats.
So it's an industrial space, it's a huge warehouse space that was then turned into a theater as well, which I connected to what we did in the pavilion.
So how do you actually come up with something scenographically and spatially that will fill the entire space, make it not look empty but also not look like things are done for the sake of filling the space.
It has to work narratively, it has to work for the viewer. So I believe my experience in theater has actually really helped in that sense because I could envision large-scale things existing in that space.
So I think what is special as well is that my participation was suggested by the younger employees of ACDF, of the foundation, and it was a huge risk for the management, for the people who actually managed all these huge projects to take on somebody who, you know,
I wouldn't say that I'm a very established artist, I'm still early in my career, my career being very turbulent and different. So if you talk about me as an exhibiting artist, as an artist who's doing contemporary art and exhibitions, I haven't been doing that for very long.
So it was a huge risk to invite somebody in the 20s basically to do something of the scale, which is a very important project, you know, for the foundation and for CCA, it's always like a massive undertaking.
Because you know, you say it's second participation in Art Biennale, but they also did two participations in the architectural Biennale, so overall it's the fourth project.
And yeah, it's a testament to their trust in us and the fact that they let not just me, but also Kuzla to participate and do something about our own experiences and something that is very sincere, I think, because we didn't come up with things out of the blue,
we didn't pull things out of the thin air, everything that we did in the pavilion is something that we're already doing. As a collective or as individual artists, it's things that we care about, things that we already practice in our everyday lives and in our professional lives and in our interactions with each other.
So I just really want to believe that what we did is representative to some extent of the community that we work with, which again, I'm not saying that we're speaking for all women in Uzbekistan because I know that we're not talking about very small community, an urban community.
But again, I just, I believe that we managed to do something very honest.
What was the feedback? How was it received from both the public and from the curators as well?
So the overall reception was positive, I think. I think a lot of people didn't expect it to be so immersive.
And when I say immersive, I don't mean that we used augmented and virtual reality because actually we didn't use any of that. People were asking me, oh, are you going to do AR, VR, and all of that.
And I said that I'm not planning to because in the context of the things we wanted to do and the themes and the concept of the exhibition, it just didn't really fit in.
It felt like a gimmick. So we just discarded the idea altogether. We do talk about technology quite a lot, but not in a very straightforward way.
The only straightforward thing about technology is this interaction of Suzanne A. Embroidery and AI.
She trained an AI too.
I'll talk about it. In terms of reception, so people didn't expect it to be so immersive and so interactive as well.
Because what I wanted to create is not just a visual journey but an emotional journey.
So what happens when you walk in is you find yourself in this theater backstage.
And coming and returning to all the things I told you about earlier in the conversation. In many ways, it is a reflection of my personal migration experience,
where I existed in these backstages in different countries, sort of growing as an artist and understanding who I am.
But also a reflection of this overall idea of going through this labyrinth of a backstage.
And as I said, all these random props and costumes come together, but not really come together because they're all from different plays.
And they're all snippets of different stories that you can't really piece together.
And in a way that, for me, metaphorically, is like, you know, we walk around looking for bits and bits and different parts of our different identities and piecing together
and not really knowing how they come together. So there was this metaphor.
You go through and you see these objects and there is a way, you can see it, that we kind of laid out clearly.
And I was working with a wonderful architectural studio as well called Adra Studio,
who helped me sort of elevate the whole concept to a whole new level.
So I created this path and you sort of go through these different stages, I guess stages of migration, because what the girls from Kuzlardu do.
And they're amazing. I love them so much.
They worked with the community and they did this extensive research where they talked to our peers about their experiences,
their experiences of migration, about their migration from maybe rural areas to the cities, or maybe different cities, or from Tashkent to another country, all these different internal-external migration routes.
And what they lived through every time. And again, similar process.
We were then gathering all these together.
We were putting it into themes, looking for similar ideas, categorizing, and looking between the lines, reading between the lines and texts,
finding ways we can represent these experiences in a more poetic, sort of non-figurative way, I guess,
which could be represented through sound or embodied memories in costume, or embroidery, video, poems.
So all of these came together in different ways.
I was doing more stuff connected to textiles and installations, and the sonography, the girls.
So there were a few, there was Nysda and Sofia, there was Kuzlar, there was Camila, another Camila.
They were working more with the video. There was Gulnoza who was working.
A performance video where she invited 13 other women to participate and create their own little performances in their domestic spaces.
So it sort of brought together a lot of people, but all from this generation that grew up post-independence after 1991.
And so the feedback, coming back to the feedback, was that it really, and again, there was an exhibition leaflet.
And you always think about your audience, like who are you actually speaking to when you're making your work,
because for me art is a dialogue. It's never, it cannot exist in a vacuum.
So art is always a dialogue, and it's really important to know who you're talking to, who you're trying to connect with.
And in the booklet I say that I would love for people with these similar experiences of young people from different countries,
similar experiences of migration, or maybe living in a diaspora to come in, to experience and see what they feel.
And a lot of these people, you know, they would come out to me during the opening week and they'd be like,
we're not from Central Asia, we don't know much about Central Asia, but I came out of the exhibit crying,
because it touched me so much and I could see so much of myself in these, in this journey, I guess.
Because in the end there's also plot twists when you get to the end of this labyrinth and you suddenly find yourself in a completely different space.
So for a lot of people it's kind of a wow moment, like where am I?
Because suddenly, I don't know if I should spoil it, I guess I should spoil it. Not everyone's going to go.
You go through this really dark backstage and suddenly you see all these pieces of costume and like different
railings that turn into different shapes of like the tap-chan or street lights and stuff.
Then you go out and then you're surrounded by these huge blue curtains and then you find yourself on a stage.
So you are suddenly blinded, like I'm blinded right now with this light, you're blinded by all these stage lights.
You're like, you know, deer sort of in the spotlight.
Of the car, yeah. You're like, oh what am I doing?
To add to this trauma, there's this audience area, so like we put some chairs, so the people who have gone through this experience,
they can sit down and look at other people. So you're not just blinded, there's people sitting there.
Looking at you.
Looking at you like this. Or what happened quite often, apparently.
I witnessed it once, but then I left and then the girls who were mediators, they would send me videos.
People would start their own performances. So sometimes, you know, enough people would gather in the audience seats
and then they would be like, oh, let's do something silly and they would start applauding people who were coming out.
And the people were either startled or they anticipated because they heard the clapping and they would come out with like a performance or something.
You know, I was scrolling on TikTok the other day and suddenly I get this video and there's, I'm like, I know what this is.
This is my pavilion, this is the pavilion. And there's this guy who filmed himself on the backdrop of these curtains on the stage dancing and put it on TikTok.
It's like, oh. So to me, in a way, I wanted to create a sense of discomfort initially when the person comes out because that space is really about this idea of visibility and visibility.
We talk about, you know, social visibility and visibility, especially with women.
But also this relationship of being observed and being the observer. How do you switch between that?
So it's all a metaphor for us existing. We live in a society, us existing within different societal constraints.
Don't miss a cue.
Yeah, and don't miss the cue is actually connected to theatre as well because you tell an actor, don't miss your cue.
Before they go on to say.
Oh, this is your cue. Don't miss it. But then also there's a word play with the word cue because you can say social cues, right?
You have to navigate certain social cues. So there's a connection with that.
And also someone told me a funny thing because don't miss the cue.
Key also sounds like cue as in like queuing.
Yes.
And then at the opening week of Venice, cues were everywhere.
So people were like, oh, what is that cue I should miss?
I want to, we came up with this name with the Dennis Slirov who was sort of a technical coordinator of the team doing a lot of admin and like really important logistical work.
And we were just brainstorming and I was like, I don't want, I want a name that will be very catchy and snappy and also make people think, what does this mean?
So this is how it came up with the word don't miss the cue, the name don't miss the cue because it's, first of all, just when you listen to it, don't miss the cue.
Very short words.
Remember it really immediately. Then it's an imperative. Don't miss the cue.
People are going like, what cue shouldn't I miss? What does that mean?
And they would come in and like question.
Curiosity.
Yeah, what.
So in like, it's a marketing strategy.
And then, yeah, it would, it also, I was also connected to this theme of theater, theatricality and being an actor on stage or performer or not.
So, yeah, and on this stage, you would find yourself and you could hide.
But then even when you're hidden and you think you're, you're not visible to the audience, you're still visible because there's cameras pointing at you, live streaming you to another layer in the back.
With little screens. So, yeah, it's about this extreme visibility to invisibility.
And to me, it was the most heartwarming part because I could see that the spaces are being activated by the audience.
It is essentially an empty space.
It has created a sort of narrative environment that has, doesn't have a live narrator, like nobody's telling you what to do.
But you go through it and then you activate it by being an audience member.
So the fact that people were engaging and keep engaging is really important to me.
And to people who want to experience that, the Pavilion is still on and it's on till 24th of November.
24th of November. I'm sure our episodes will be released before that.
So anyone who wants to experience what Aziza has described, the Pavilion is still on till November.
Aziza, there's a lot of things I want to discuss, but unfortunately the time is limited.
I'm sure that we will have a few more episodes with you covering other topics.
Diving deep into the topics that we didn't dive deep.
We have a few traditions on our podcast.
The first one is the book recommendation.
We ask the guests to recommend one book to the audience and explain why.
I am a big fan of magical realism, as you might have realized with 100 years of solitude and all of that.
And there is this book by an Iranian author, Women Without Men, a novel of modern Iran.
And it's by the author called Shahr Nush Parsipu.
Put the link in the description for people who want to...
And I read it on the plane. It's not a very long book.
I read it on the plane on my way to...
I was flying, I was flying. It was like a two and a half hour flight.
Not as good.
No, no, no. I can't remember where it was.
It was two and a half hour, three hour flight. I read it back to back.
It was pretty interesting, first of all.
And it is this fable slash phantasmagorical story about different women in Iran.
And their lives sort of come together and they set apart.
So it's got these several narrative lines.
It is about the plight of a woman in a way, but it's written in a very tender, sort of beautiful way.
And it's got a lot of magical realism in it.
A woman turns into a tree, that kind of thing.
And it's very poetic. And it's something that I really like in art in general.
In a way, that's why I also really enjoy, for example, the Egyptian pavilion at the binari,
because it is about, it was this, so it's an opera about an uprising against the colonial powers in the end of the 19th century in Egypt.
And it's about very tragic events, but it's done in such a poetic way in this beautiful opera.
And you just have to see it. It's wonderful.
That's why I like this kind of art, because you can weave these narratives in a very soft way, talking about something that can be quite traumatic and difficult to digest otherwise.
That's the book.
As I said, I will put the link on the show notes. Do get a copy and read it. I am certainly curious.
Right, Aziza. Another tradition we have is we ask each guest to leave a question to the following guest.
I didn't prepare my question.
It's fine. You don't have to ask it now.
Okay.
I can ask it off the record, but the person who was recorded before you has asked the following question to you.
I'm scared.
The question is...
Should I be scared?
No, it's an interesting question.
What kind of...
It's translated. The question is in Uzbek and it's translated in English.
What kind of heritage you want to leave after yourself and what are you doing now to make it happen?
Oh my God. That is very profound. It's like...
What's the meaning of life? What kind of heritage?
Hmm. I think it's something I always tell people in a jokey way, but I'm actually quite serious about it.
When I get rich... Not if. When I get rich.
I want to create a foundation that will... Not a foundation, maybe a fund. Something.
Something that will support creatives that need support.
In Central Asia, maybe. Something that can provide more resources.
I don't know exactly yet, but I feel like a lot of times what we really need is just money to do things and to get things done.
And it would be something that I would love to do.
And it is an extension of what I'm trying to do already.
With the exception of not being rich.
That's the second part of the question. What are you doing now to achieve that?
Yeah. I think, again, it's coming from what I'm doing and what we are doing with Klaslar, for example.
Of course, we're not creating this huge platform that gives a lot of money and resources to people, but we're doing what we can within the limits that we have.
And the restrictions. Because, again, most of the women in Klaslar also have full-time jobs. Some have children.
So you have to juggle all of that. And then on top, also do things for Klaslar.
But because we all are so passionate about doing this, I have believed that something good will happen.
And that maybe we're at least inspiring some people.
Because, I mean, it's a selfish thing to say.
But one of the reasons I really want to do Klaslar, I want to keep doing it, is because when I was younger, I didn't have a kind of a role model that was doing things that I wanted to do and who was also from Central Asia.
And I kind of, if we can become these kind of role models, but something that doesn't sound as pompous, you know, something that sounds better than that,
maybe inspiration for the younger generation that can look at what we're doing and say, oh, we can also do these things. I didn't realize.
That is something I really, really care about deeply.
So to people who want to find out more about Klaslar, maybe want to be part of it, either by joining it or by supporting it financially or other how, where can they find out more information about it?
So we have an Instagram page.
We should repeat on the notes.
Check the description.
We have an Instagram page. We are working on a website. Again, resources. We have to find time to do it.
We have a very active Instagram page.
And you can find our contacts on it.
We also have several different projects happening.
So we're now developing an online video course that's going to be free and translated into different languages that are spoken in Uzbekistan.
So Uzbek, Tajik, Karakalpak as well.
And it's going to be a course from women artists to women.
And it is related to using technology in the arts. And I'm really excited about it.
Sort of came up with it end of last year.
And now it's sort of coming to some point where we have an open call.
It's going to be closed by the time this comes out.
But we're doing an open call.
We're looking for people who want to submit and do these things because we're able to pay.
The contributor is really happy about it.
So it's one of the things, but there's also a bunch of other initiatives that we're working with.
If they follow you on Instagram, they'll know about different things happening.
Yes, yes. And hopefully, things will be okay.
Yeah, well, what you're doing is quite cool.
And I'm sure many people will be interested in finding out more about it.
The last tradition is the free microphone.
It's you and the audience. You can say whatever you want.
You're free to say whatever you want. I will not be interrupting.
So this is the camera.
I need to, I'm glad that you're here.
And I'm glad that I was able to share my story.
And if it resonates with any of you, that will make me very happy.
I know it is hard, and especially if there's people here who want to do the arts or try themselves in the creative sector.
I know it can be very difficult.
And one of the main things that I've realized is the path is never straightforward.
You're going to bump into obstacles.
You're going to find yourself doing things that you're not really necessarily enjoying.
But all of this builds up your experience and builds up your outlook to the world.
And in the end, all of this knowledge, even the knowledge that you thought wasn't going to be useful, is going to be useful in things that you do.
So hold on to that.
And I'm going to do a shameless plug.
I think, I don't know, when is this going to come out? I don't know.
September, let's say September.
Yeah. So it is September now, most likely.
So I'm having, I'm participating in a group exhibition in Berlin in a place called Kindle.
And the link is going to be in the description.
So please come along if you want to support and see my work.
And if you're in Berlin, we're also having some exhibitions coming up with Kuzlar and also my own kind of projects in different cities in Italy and also in London.
So subscribe, I guess, to my Instagram where I'll be posting more about it.
Yeah. And also, if you're interested in Susan the embroidery and the AI experiments that I do and all the kind of art and technology stuff, subscribe to my Instagram.
I do a lot of reels.
I talk about my research.
I talk about, I do tutorials.
And yeah, you can always message me there if you have any questions.
Great.
That's a long one.
No, that was a good one.
Thank you very much for your time, for sharing your story and for inspiring our audience.
As I said, I'm looking forward to our many more other episodes in the future.
We will dive deeper.
We will dive deeper to the topics that we haven't had opportunity.
In a couple of years, I'll be able to do it in a spec.
What's a challenge?
That's a good challenge.
I hope this stuff I said was actually interesting.
Thanks a lot.
That's it.
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