T H E P I L L ® is delighted to present Looking Sideways: A Guide to Misinterpreting Myself, the first solo exhibition in Istanbul and Turkey by British artist Aziza Shadenova, of Kazakh and Uzbek descent. Opening on September 13, 2025, the exhibition runs in parallel with the 18th Istanbul Biennial and follows the artist’s recent participation in the 2025 Bukhara Biennial.
Spanning photography, painting, sculpture, video, and installation, Shadenova’s multidisciplinary practice draws from Central Asian ecologies and traditions of abstraction. Her work engages with the complexities of displacement, migration, memory, and feminist modes of knowledge transmission in a rapidly shifting world, particularly through the lens of post-Soviet cultural upheaval.
Looking Sideways: A Guide to Misinterpreting Myself explores the impulse to look away rather than confront—and the ambiguity that emerges when identity and self-perception become unstable. Shadenova’s newly produced wooden cutouts function simultaneously as flat puzzle pieces for a moving collage and as shadow theatre figures, animated by light and the viewer’s gaze. Drawing from personal autobiography as a site of cultural and political transformation, the exhibition embraces uncertainty as a way to resist singular narratives. Through layered compositions and a search for the absurd, Shadenova foregrounds misrecognition, imperfection, and chance as integral to her process. Rather than seeking resolution, the exhibition invites a space for not knowing—for contradiction, reinvention, and ongoing becoming.
Shadenova proposes a nonlinear understanding of time, conjuring emotional, speculative, and mnemonic worlds shaped by her upbringing, diasporic experience, and a family history entwined with colonial legacies. Her Dadaesque visual language draws from both 20th-century European avant-gardes and contemporary countercultures, employing mirrored images, patterns, repetition, and collage. Motifs reference the evolving landscapes and nomadic practices around the Aral Sea—now under economic and ecological duress—and incorporate ancestral forms of making, including plaits, dowries, and food rituals. Her work navigates dysfunctional mental states and dislocations of migration to question what it means to belong, to remember, and to evolve within and beyond cultural frameworks. Attuned to past and present forms of invisible female labor, her choice of materials and crafts ranges from textiles, hair, wool, soil, and stones to garments, tapestry, painting and animation. Through humour and strategies of the absurd, her poetic assemblages reveal—and attempt to heal—the psychic and material scars of political and economic violence.
Aziza Shadenova (b.1989) is a British artist of Kazakh and Uzbek descent, living and working in Hastings, UK. After completing a BA in Graphic Design at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (2011), she took part in Winter: Poetics & Politics, Central Asian Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale (Venice, 2013). Shadenova’s solo exhibitions include My Cocoon Tightens - Colours Tease, Ainalaiynspace (London, 2022) and Textures of Grieving, HOP Projects (Folkestone, 2018). She has participated in institutional group exhibitions such as Recipes for Broken Hearts - Bukhara Biennial, cur. Diana Campbell (Bukhara, 2025); The Pleasure of Misuse, Royal Society of Sculptors (London, 2025); Lining Revealed. A Journey Through Folk Wisdom and Contemporary Vision, Mill6CHAT Centre for Heritage Arts & Textile (Hong Kong, 2025); I Swear I Saw That, cur. Sara Raza, Mathaf Museum of Modern Art (Doha, 2024); How to Hold Your Breath - 9th Asian Art Biennial, (Taichung, 2024); Thinking Historically in the Present, cur. Okwui Enwezor and Hoor Al Qasimi, Sharjah Biennial 15 (Sharjah, 2023) and New Mythologies of Central Asia, Sapar Contemporary (New York, 2020). Shadenova’s works are held in private and public collections worldwide: LACMA, Los Angeles; Moving Image London, UK; ABR, Almaty, Kazakhstan; National Museum of Kazakhstan, Astana, Kazakhstan.
