Sabina Kuangaliyeva (Kazakhstan) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice critically engages with photography as a tool for looking: decoding landscapes, reading material traces, and questioning spectatorship. Working across research, performance, installation, and collective practices, she examines the technogenic catastrophes of Kazakhstan through their material remnants, exploring collective trauma and the mythologies that emerge from ecological and historical rupture. Working with anthropogenic minerals and the intersections of personal and collective memory, she considers what persists in landscape, matter, and the body.
During her residency at Delfina Foundation, Kuangaliyeva will develop On Rocks, Dreams, and Waters, an artistic research project exploring technogenic catastrophes and mystic minerals, the Caspian Sea and the Zhaiyq River, and the monuments of Islamic Central Asia alongside sites of nuclear testing. The project considers the Earth’s response to human intervention, examining how resistance may materialise through dreams, nightmares, and geological processes. During the residency, she will conduct research and writing, work with public collections in London, and explore alternative and experimental printing practices as a means of translating raw mineral matter into objects and performance.
Recent projects and exhibitions include Everything is Lost & Therefore Safe at Atelier Cauchemar (2025); New York Spectacular Experiments on the Great Atomic Bombreflector, presented by CultureHub and La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club (2024); LAI–PI–CHU–PLEE–LAPA, the National Pavilion of Kazakhstan at the Venice Biennale (2022); Here, There, Nowhere at Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture (2021); and Focus Kazakhstan: Eurasian Utopia, Post Scriptum at Suwon IPark Museum of Art (2018). Her publications include The First Volume of the Novel in a Thousand Volumes: Publication of Archival Texts by Sergey Kalmykov (2019); Sacred Expositions of the Great and Immortal LAI–PI–CHU–PLEE–LAPA, the catalogue for Kazakhstan’s first national pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022); and The Second Volume of the Novel in a Thousand Volumes: Publication of Texts by Sergey Kalmykov in English (2022).
Kuangaliyeva holds a Bachelor of Social Science in Public Administration from KIMEP University (2013).
Kuangaliyeva was born in Atyrau, Kazakhstan and is currently based in Kazakhstan.
Headline Supporters:
SÄR Foundation & Salima
Artist’s website
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Please note all artist-in-residence biographies are accurate at the time of their residency. For up-to-date bios please visit the artist’s website.