Aziza Kadyri’s AI Suzani Series: Self-exoticisation Archives (2023­—ongoing) interrogates the intersections of heritage, identity, and algorithmic bias. Drawing on the traditional Central Asian practice of Suzani embroidery — historically produced in communal, intergenerational contexts — Kadyri trains AI systems on its ornamental patterns to generate new, hybridised designs. These motifs are then projected back onto her own image, producing self-portraits that oscillate between ornamentation and erasure. By deliberately engaging in an act of “self-exoticisation,” Kadyri reclaims the aesthetic codes through which her cultural identity has often been mediated, critiquing both orientalist framing and the reductive tendencies of generative datasets. The
resulting works blur boundaries between textile, portraiture, and machine vision, situating personal memory within a wider discourse on visibility, displacement, and cultural commodification.

Aziza Kadyri (b. 1994) is a London-based Uzbek multidisciplinary artist working across textiles, sculpture, new technologies, and performance practices. Her approach is characterised by a fusion of collaboration and interdisciplinary methodologies that drive the creation of both physical and digital immersive experiences.

An interest in participatory practices within local communities is central to her practice and led her to cofound Qizlar, a self-organised grassroots collective firmly grounded in principles of interdisciplinarity and intersectionality, as well as enacting social change. Themes of migration, displacement, social invisibility, identity, decolonisation and feminism provide a lens through which she examines societal dynamics and the experiences of women within Central Asia and diaspora.

Interested in the potential of new media to enrich artistic research and socially engaged practices, she seeks to understand and harness the capabilities of these tools to facilitate deeper engagement and interaction within artistic, activist and cultural contexts. Her work has been exhibited internationally including at Zhejiang Art Museum, Hangzhou, China; Somerset House, London, UK; Cinematheque, Cleveland Institute of Art, Ohio, US; Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany.