Aziya
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Aziya is a Kazakh-born painter based in Prague. Her recent work has turned darker and more uncertain, less of the bright color she was known for. Aziya paints women, always from a woman's point of view. The body often becomes a landscape in her work, the one thing that stayed constant through a life of moving. In July she showed in the group show Soft Power in Bratislava. A solo show in Tokyo is on the way.
Q: When we last talked, your work was moving from peace toward tension. Where has that gone since?
A: Into darker places, honestly. The palette has dropped – less of the bright, sunlit color people associate with me, more shadow and depth. And the narratives have gotten less comfortable. Mostly through small, ambiguous details. In one painting, a woman holds an object close to another woman's face: it could be a nail file, it could be a knife. You can't quite tell. And both women have their eyes closed, calm, almost tender. That's the tension I'm after now. Not a dramatic scene, but a quiet one with something uncertain inside it. The discomfort comes from not knowing how to read it.
I used to want an image to feel settled. Now I'm more interested in the moment before it settles, when you're not sure what you're looking at, or how you're supposed to feel.
Q: After years of moving, you now hold Czech citizenship. What did arriving somewhere permanent do to the work?
A: The passport is permanent. The feeling isn't. I'm not painting from the position of someone who arrived. I'm painting from the position of someone still looking for where she belongs. That search has always been in the work, and so has the anxiety underneath it. A document doesn't switch that off. I've been abroad for twenty already. Maybe getting used to the feeling of home takes another twenty years.
Q: You build a polished, brushstroke-free surface by hand, slowly. What does that finish give the image?
A: The image becomes self-sufficient. It stands on its own, without me hovering over it.
That matters because the stories in the work are very personal. If you could see my hand in every stroke, the emotion, the struggle, the effort, the paintings would become about me making them. They would turn into a kind of confession. I don't want that. I remove my hand to balance out how personal the content is.
So the polish is a form of restraint. The viewer meets the work, not me.
Q: You keep returning to landscapes as bodies, where a hill and a shoulder share a schema. Where does that come from?
A: From a French philosopher, actually, Merleau-Ponty. He wrote about the body schema: the idea that we don't experience the body as an object we look at, but as the way we're anchored in the world. The body is how we're placed, how we reach, how we know where we end and the world begins. That stayed with me.
Because if the body is how you're anchored, then for someone who keeps moving, it becomes the only anchor you have. The landscape changes under you: cities, languages, light. So I think the body is the one ground that comes with you. When I paint a body as a landscape, I'm painting the only geography I never had to leave.
Q: Your paintings almost always come back to women. What keeps them at the center of the work?
A: It's the vantage point for me. Early on, people read the work as being about sisterhood, the bonds between women, and that was there. Lately it's turned more inward, toward one woman's interior, her sense of herself. But it's always the same starting place. I paint women because I'm looking out from inside one.
Q: Where is the work heading next?
A: In July I'm in a group show, Soft Power, at Umrian Gallery in Bratislava, with three great women artists. It looks at how culture quietly shapes the way we see the body and ourselves, which sits close to what I've been painting.
And I'm preparing a solo show in Tokyo, built around an idea I keep returning to: the emptiness in the vessel. A vessel is defined not by its walls but by the hollow inside it. The empty space is what lets it hold anything at all. I've started to think a self works the same way. What we experience as absence, or not-belonging, might be the very space that lets everything else in: other people, memory, change.
For someone who has spent her life moving, that's a hopeful thought. The emptiness isn't a lack. It's capacity. That's where the work is heading.
