Works
Data, material,
and the people behind both
Voices of Silence, 2024. Paint, texture paste and imitation silver leaf on canvas, 100 × 150 × 5 cm
2024 · Relief painting
Voices of Silence
A relief painting built from official data on domestic violence in Kyrgyzstan. Each relief line stands for thousands of affected women. The silver leaf is the only source of light in the work: it marks the circle of women who survived.
Between 2018 and 2022 reported cases rose by 38%, reaching nearly 10,000 in 2022. Women were 97% of those who survived; men were 95% of those who caused the harm.
The work did not begin with statistics. I grew up seeing domestic violence, and I saw how it was passed on — not only through what men did, but through what older women taught girls. Violence became a system that reproduces itself rather than a single act.
“Domestic violence is a reality that exists right next to us. We cannot remain silent about it. We must speak, understand and act to stop this cycle of pain.” Catalogue, Tirek: The Thread of Her Life, UN Women, 2025
Exhibited: National History Museum of the Kyrgyz Republic, Bishkek, July 2025 · Almaty Gallery, Kazakhstan, December 2025.
Press: Kaktus.media · The Astana Times
Building the relief by hand
Each dot marks one perpetrator
Almaty Gallery, December 2025
2024 · Textile art object
Cultural Code
A textile object in the form of a traditional chapan, made with multilayered cut-through appliqué and hand stitching.
The layering of fabrics becomes an image of time: the past does not disappear but is held beneath the surface of the present and shows through it. The work addresses inheritance, ancestral memory, and a cultural code that goes on living even as its outward form changes.
Studio work, not previously exhibited.
Cultural Code, 2024
Hand stitching, work in progress
National History Museum, Bishkek, July 2025
2014–2018 · Participatory practice
Work with communities
Children finding themselves on the exhibition panels, Bishkek, 2015
I co-founded and coordinated Help Today, a volunteer movement working with children and older people in institutional care: a neuropsychiatric residential home for children with complex needs, a preschool orphanage, an infant home, a rehabilitation centre for street children, a boarding school for deaf children, and residential homes for older people.
A public concert funded beds for the boarding school. Craft workshops sold the children's work and bought them winter shoes. At a home for older people we brought food and clothing, and sold the drawings of a resident artist so that she would have money of her own.
In 2014 I ran The World Through Children's Eyes, giving cameras to children in care; in 2015 we organised a public exhibition of their photographs. These projects came ten years before I described what I do as participatory art. The principle was already there: the author is the person usually photographed by others.
Press on the 2015 exhibition: K-News
A circle game
Soap bubbles in the yard
Her drawings, sold so she would have an income of her own
In progress
A city that was not
designed for everyone
A documentary project on accessibility in Bishkek for mothers with prams — kerbs without ramps, pavements too narrow to pass, stops that cannot be reached. The same method as Voices of Silence, with the city as its subject. Exhibition in preparation.