Jazgul Madazimova

Lives and works in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

Artist statement

I came to art through the body before I came to it through paper, composition, or form. Embodied memory became the language I could understand most clearly. It held grief, intuition, and the traces of those who came before me. My practice begins there. I follow what the body already knows. I am a multidisciplinary artist working in performance, installation, and drawing, based in Kyrgyzstan. Growing up, I watched my mother's generation — women from a deeply patriarchal society — effectively sustain the country by working abroad in Russia and sending money home. That fact shaped the topics I have explored lately, but not limited to: the legacy of colonialism, migration and borders, and the women who carry them. My method follows from this: I collect materials from the hands and bodies of women whose labor is usually unseen — headscarves, factory waste, soil from places of memory — and transform them through collaborative, durational ritual. Often, I give them back. What the body already knows — how to receive, hold, bury, and return — becomes the structure of the work itself. My method arrives from the knowledge of the body — grief, memory, deep intuitive knowledge — transformed into artwork through the objects that carry them: soil, the scent a mother leaves on a headscarf, sleep and what we sleep in.

Artwork