Aziza Kadyri

I am a London-based interdisciplinary artist working with textiles, installation, performance, and creative technology, and the co-founder of Qizlar, a collective of artists and activists from Uzbekistan and its diaspora. My practice explores how handcraft, Central Asian identities, and global digital cultures intersect, using textiles and interactive installations to tell speculative stories, preserve memory, and resist erasure – contributing to wider conversations on decolonial aesthetics and feminist tech. I represented Uzbekistan alongside Qizlar Collective at the 2024 Venice Biennale. I am currently a Creative Technologies Fellow at Somerset House Studios in collaboration with the UAL Creative Computing Institute.

HOW DOES YOUR SUBMITTED WORK RESPOND TO THE CIRCA 20:25 MANIFESTO?
This film offers a glimpse into my father’s unrealised dream and my own experience as a migrant navigating uprooted identity and fractured belonging. Centred where memory and lineage meet, it unfolds as a rhetorical one-sided dialogue between myself and him, whose path to becoming a nuclear physicist was derailed by the Soviet Union’s collapse and subsequent migration. Moving through Tashkent’s symbolic landscapes – once alive with scientific ambition, now quiet monuments to transformed ideals – it reflects a generation’s hopes and anxieties. In dialogue with the CIRCA 20:25 manifesto, it offers an emotional sanctuary for unfulfilled futures, embracing the tension between disillusionment, optimism, displacement and resilience.

IF AWARDED THE £30,000 CIRCA PRIZE, WHAT 10-MINUTE WORK WOULD YOU CREATE – AND HOW WOULD IT EMBODY THE SPIRIT OF REFUGIA?
I envision an interdisciplinary film that unfolds inside an immersive, participatory installation. At its centre is my self-fabricated alter ego: a female trickster rooted in contemporary Uzbek diasporic identity. Using oral histories and speculative worldbuilding, I construct ‘abandoned sets’ – volatile, shape-shifting environments where performances survive only as traces. The work pursues unfulfilled dreams within my family, stifled by policies, patriarchy, and shifting powers in the region. As these personal legacies near obsolescence, the installation becomes a charged site of return and resistance, reviving overlooked Central Asian narratives in a space where identities blur, and memory collides with myth.

FOLLOW AZIZA KADYRI ON INSTAGRAM

Funding for the CIRCA PRIZE is generated entirely by the #CIRCAECONOMY, a circular model that reinvests proceeds from affordable art sold on CIRCA.ART into new public art commissions, charitable causes, art education and prizes. Since launching in 2020, the initiative has raised over £1 Million, placing artists and communities at the centre of an economy that continually reinvests in the future of art and culture.

The CIRCA PRIZE 2025 winners will be revealed LIVE in Piccadilly Circus on Monday 13 October, with a special 30-minute award ceremony starting at 20:00 BST. Don’t miss it!