Frames are constructed, and borders are blurred. My practice is grounded in a continual investigation of these thresholds: the moment I attempt to fix them, space loses its vital tension, the magic of life and love dissipates, and everything congeals into a cold, concrete cube. By “borders,” I do not mean lines on a map, but a mode of perceiving reality — one in which embodied knowledge operates as a conduit between the personal and the public. I position myself as a mediator: not in a pursuit of harmony or order, but in the destabilization of established roles and materials, at the point where familiar meanings fracture and become open to reconsideration.

The urban space of Tashkent serves as a key reference. It is one the world’s most eclectic cities, where Islamic architectural legacies intertwine with Soviet modernism, post-Soviet transformations, and the contemporary imagery of global gloss. While modernism privileges purity of form, local craft introduces rhythms of variation and unpredictability. Their intersection produces a nonlinear, stratified contemporaneity — shimmering and multiple, much like the identities of the region’s inhabitants.

The urban space of Tashkent serves as a key reference. It is among the world’s most eclectic cities, where Islamic architectural legacies intertwine with Soviet modernism, post-Soviet transformations, and the contemporary imagery of global gloss. While modernism privileges purity of form, local craft introduces rhythms of variation and unpredictability. Their intersection produces a nonlinear, stratified contemporaneity — shimmering and multiple, much like the identities of the region’s inhabitants.

My engagement with craft and architecture as two “bodies” of material memory leads to a central research question: how do the material practices of Central Asia generate their own forms of contemporaneity, beyond the binary frameworks of “tradition versus high art” or “heritage versus loss”? Craft does not become art through museum display alone, but through dialogue with bodies, spaces, and lived practices - when a craftswoman alters a pattern and becomes a co-author of urban form, or when residents adapt a modernist building and assume authorship over architecture.

When we speak about the culture of Central Asia - a region whose identity has been shaped for centuries through intersections, migrations, and the constant transformation of its own borders - it becomes impossible to perceive it through universal or fixed categories. In this context, the language of craft is not merely a decorative form or a mode of expression, but a form of material knowledge capable of remaining resilient through historical transformations. This knowledge existed beyond articulated systems, transmitted through the body, everyday gestures, repetition, and shared experience.

In examining this aspect, it is important to pay attention not only to visible changes in form, but also to the very mechanisms through which knowledge is transmitted: who was able to speak through this language, and who held the ability to preserve and transform it. Here we arrive at the question of what art is and who can be recognized as an artist within such a context. For me, the presence of overlooked voices is especially important. The influence of participants in everyday life often remains invisible, yet it is them who shape the living fabric of cultural space. In this sense, art is not created separately from life, but within it, continuously influencing the ways we exist, perceive, and interact with our environment.

Within my personal practice, I explore the interaction between textile and wood as carriers of familial and sensory memory. I learned to work with fabric by observing my mother sewing and embroidering, and this embodied knowledge is woven into my work. One of my early pieces is a tapestry in which delicate fields of color coexist with dark squares and ruffled elements.

Initially, I perceived the ruffles as a compositional failure; later, I came to understand them as traces of domestic craft — a bodily, intimate presence inseparable from artistic form. This shift revealed how cognitive constraints can limit our perception of matter’s fullness. When material returns to the body, it ceases to function as an archive — it becomes alive.