Assel Kadyrkhanova is a visual artist and postdoctoral research fellow. Her research looks at art as a medium of memory with a specific focus on cultural memory and trauma in post-Soviet Kazakhstan.  At Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, she focuses on Artistic research as a way of dealing with contested heritage, or difficult pasts in societies burdened with colonial and totalitarian legacies.

Kadyrkhanova works across drawing, textile, installation art and moving image. Her recent hand-drawn animation All the Dreams We Dream (2020) reflects on the (non-)memory of the Kazakh famine in 1930 - 1933. The film relies on memoirs of the famine survivors on their encounters with victims who are described with non-human metaphors, which became starting points for reflection on the effects of dehumanisation and systemic oppression. Reworked into anthropomorphic figures, in the animation film, they appear as revenants from an undocumented traumatic past. The film has been shown at the Calvert Journal Film Festival (2021), documenta 15 (2022), goEASt Film Festival, and Samizat Film Festival (2023) among other exhibitions and screenings.

2023 Medium and Memory, Hackelbury Fine Art, London, UK

2023 Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, UK

2023 goEast Film Festival, Weisbaden, Germany

2023 Clouds, Power and Ornament: Roving Central Asia, Centre for Heritage, Art, and Textile (C.H.A.T.), Hong Kong

2023 Moving Image from Central Asia, Davra Collective public programme, Documenta 15, Kassel, Germany

2021 Calvert Journal Film Festival, London

2019 Living Memory, Almaty City Museum, Kazakhstan

2019 CITATION, an exhibition within the European Artistic Research Network (EARN) conference, Leeds, UK

2018 Focus Kazakhstan: Postnomadic Mind, Wapping Project, London, UK

2018 At the Corner: City, Place, People, Tselinny Centre for Contemporary Art, Almaty, Kazakhstan

2018 Mixer Sessions III, Mixer Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey

2017 Windows of Tolerance (solo show), Project Space, University of Leeds, UK

2017 Suns and Neons above Kazakhstan, Yarat Contemporary Museum of Art, Baku, Azerbaijan

2017 Internal Memory: Not Enough Space? Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow

2023 'Stitch, Unstitch', in Suture: Reimagining Ornament, collective volume, MillCHAT, Almaty Hongkong

2022 'Becoming a Secondary Witness', conference proceedings, in Witnessing, Memory and Crisis, Amsterdam University Press.

2021 The Endless Time After, in Stalinism in Kazakhstan: History, Memory, Representation, eds. M. Akulov, Zh. Abylkhozhin, A. Tsay, Lexington Books

2016 - 2021 PhD (Practice-led) University of Leeds, UK

2009 - 2011 Master of Fine Art, Newcastle University, UK

2005 - 2007 MA Painting, Kazakh National Academy of Arts

2001 - 2005 BA Painting, Kazakh National Academy of Art