Assel Kadyrkhanova is a visual artist, researcher and postdoctoral fellow. Her practice-led research looks at art as a medium of memory, focussing on post-Soviet postcolonial Central Asia.  At the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, she focuses on the potential of art to deal with contested heritage - or the haunting legacies in societies burdened with colonial and totalitarian pasts. She works with concepts of aesthetic transformation, empathic vision, and haptic visuality.

Kadyrkhanova works across drawing, textile, installation art and moving image. Her hand-drawn animation film All the Dreams We Dream (2020) explores the memory of the Kazakh famine in 1930 - 1933. The film relies on memoirs of survivors of their encounters with famine victims who are described with non-human metaphors.  The film has derived from prolonged thinking-through-making - the artist's reflection on the legacies of fear and guilt in post-famine society. It aims to create a space for resistance to established Soviet ideological narratives and make visible what remained obscured and silenced. Her works have been shown at documenta 15 (2022), MillCHAT, Centre for Heritage, Art and Textile (2023),  goEast Film Festival Weisbaden (2023), Samizdat Film Festival (2023), Queensland Art Gallery (2025) among other exhibitions and screenings.

2023 Medium and Memory, curated by Griselda Pollock, 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 (MillC.H.A.T.), Hong Kong

2023 Documenta 15 - DAVRA Collective's public programme, 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

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: Art, Trauma and the (non-)Memory of the Kazakh Famine, 1930 - 1933', 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