Looking Sideways: A Guide to Misinterpreting Myself: Aziza Shadenova

Press release
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 coincides 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, engaging themes of displacement, migration, feminist knowledge transmission, and memory in a rapidly shifting post-Soviet world.
 
Looking Sideways: A Guide to Misinterpreting Myself unfolds as a choreography of doubles and displacements. Conceived as a series of paired works, the exhibition takes as its starting point the image of a coin: two opposing sides, each inseparable from the other and a third dimension that emerges in movement, through the acts of spinning and turning — a speculative “third side” that comes alive in the space between. This logic of oscillation structures the exhibition, where contrast and repetition become strategies to think beyond binary positions.
 
In an immersive installation unfolding in a strict palette of black and white, each work finds its counterpoint through movement and shifting perspectives. For Shadenova, black and white are not absolutes but speculative forces, expanding into negative space and shadow projections, multiplying like quantum patterns. In a world where conflict often prompts the claim that “nothing is black and white,” she asks what other colors we imagine when we dismiss such starkness. Her recent focus on greys, stripes, and monochromes grows from this question, embracing uncertainty as an active condition rather than a deficiency.
 
This interrogation of perspective is crystallized in A Forest (See into the trees), a work that rethinks the idiom “not seeing the forest for the trees.” For Shadenova, the phrase resonates with both artistic process and lived experience: the pull between obsession with detail and the lure of an imagined “whole.” Is the forest anything more than its trees? Does the whole carry a spirit beyond its parts? By isolating forms yet inviting them into collective rhythm, the works stage this paradox, offering no resolution but rather a meditation on perception itself.
 
Hibernation Nation extends this play of contradictions through the paranja, a garment once worn by women across Central Asia. Vilified and abandoned during the Soviet era in the name of emancipation, the paranja’s present-day return is entangled in debates around identity, faith, and agency. Shadenova reimagines it as a sleeping bag stitched from Uzbek and Soviet textiles — two material histories folded into one cocoon. The work resists a singular reading: the cocoon may be protective or restrictive, preservative or inert. Like the paired works across the exhibition, it holds open the possibility of multiple, even opposing, interpretations.
 
Shadenova’s practice sits within a lineage of artists who mobilize absurdity and contradiction as tools of resistance. Her assemblages propose art as a space for healing and renegotiation, while also adopting absurdist strategies and pop art to reframe tradition and renegotiate meanings. Yet her gestures are deeply rooted in the cultural landscapes of Central Asia — in ancestral practices such as plaiting, dowries, and food rituals, and in motifs such as arched windows and everyday objects turned into patterns and pillars. 
 
Looking Sideways: A Guide to Misinterpreting Myself ultimately frames uncertainty not as failure, but as method. By embracing misinterpretation, imperfection, and contradiction, Shadenova resists the drive toward clarity and closure. In doing so, she conjures a poetics of becoming — a space where belonging, memory, and identity remain open to reinvention.
 
Aziza 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. Navigating mental dislocation and the psychic residue of migration, her work questions what it means to belong, to remember, and to adapt within and beyond inherited frameworks. Sensitive to past and present forms of invisible female labor, Shadenova works with materials such as textiles, hair, wool, soil, stones, garments, tapestry, painting, and animation. Through humor 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.
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