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Kadyrova Street
Collection:CSM Museum & Study Collection
Date: 2020
Artist: Aziza Kadyri
Medium: Video
Object number: TH.2020.106.CC
Description‘Kadyrova Street’ was created during UK lockdown. It is meant to convey to audiences at home what it would’ve felt like to watch ‘Fittings’ (my one-woman show and final MA PDP project cancelled due to the pandemic) in a theatre. In no means a replacement for the live performance, ‘Kadyrova Street’ is rather an augmentation and a story in itself: by emphasising the complexity of my relationships with Moscow and Tashkent, I explore the stereotypes young Uzbek (and Central Asian) migrants encounter on daily basis.
In ‘Fittings’ (and partially in ‘Kadyrova Street’), I challenge the notion of cultural identity as a clearly definable concept. My own battles with constant reprocessing of self-identification and the experiences of my ancestors that lived on the crossways of the Silk Road have proven that the meanings encoded in us are inherently universal. I expose the idiosyncrasies of migrant identity while playing with exaggerated theatrical clichés and borrowing from the process of disidentification, using ambivalence as a performance tool. I look at personal experiences in Uzbekistan, Russia and China through the eye of an insider and the language of an outsider. The narration reveals a tangle of traditional lifestyles, Soviet ideology and Islamic values. The playfulness of tone and the awe of visual transformations guide the audience through recollections of familial memories towards the universal message of “what is home?”.
In ‘Fittings’ (and partially in ‘Kadyrova Street’), I challenge the notion of cultural identity as a clearly definable concept. My own battles with constant reprocessing of self-identification and the experiences of my ancestors that lived on the crossways of the Silk Road have proven that the meanings encoded in us are inherently universal. I expose the idiosyncrasies of migrant identity while playing with exaggerated theatrical clichés and borrowing from the process of disidentification, using ambivalence as a performance tool. I look at personal experiences in Uzbekistan, Russia and China through the eye of an insider and the language of an outsider. The narration reveals a tangle of traditional lifestyles, Soviet ideology and Islamic values. The playfulness of tone and the awe of visual transformations guide the audience through recollections of familial memories towards the universal message of “what is home?”.