b. 1967, Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Dilyara Kaipova is a contemporary Uzbek artist transforming traditional Central Asian textile techniques. She reinterprets abra motifs, a type of handwoven textile, juxtaposing them with modern pop culture characters like Mickey Mouse and Darth Vader to create powerful statements on globalisation and national identity. Her work also addresses Uzbekistan’s fraught legacy of cotton farming and its broader ecological, cultural and social implications. In collaboration with the artist duo NoolOdin, known for their art practice of computer coding, Kaipova presents her work the National Uzbek Robe ‘Paxta’ in Qonaqtar. This green robe features a white pattern that, while visually evocative of ancient Arabic Kufic script, is actually the Uzbek word paxta (cotton) encoded via NoolOdin’s proprietary trinary code – a system translating digits into three visual elements. This method references Uzbekistan’s colonial cotton legacy and the tumultuous, multi-script history of the Uzbek language (Arabic, Latin, Cyrillic), underscoring constant cultural shifts and language as a vital element of belonging within the exhibition’s context.