Alexandra Tsay

Alexandra Tsay is an independent curator and a PhD candidate in the Interuniversity Doctoral Program in Art History at Concordia University, whose work focuses on contemporary art in Central Asia within transnational and global paradigms. Her dissertation examines artistic developments in late Soviet and post-independence Kazakhstan, theorizing situated aesthetics and artistic epistemes that challenge power-knowledge hierarchies. Her research has been supported by the Fonds de recherche du Québec and Global Affairs Canada.

Alexandra was a visiting fellow at the Central Asia Program at the George Washington University and a research fellow at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul in 2017. She is a co-editor of Stalinism in Kazakhstan: History, Memory, and Representation, published in Russian, Kazakh, and English, and a contributor to The Nazarbayev Generation: Youth in Kazakhstan. Her recent curatorial projects include Suture: Reimagining the Ornament (2023) in Hong Kong and Living Memory (2020) in Almaty.

Contributions

Central Asia | A Global Museum

Haptic Entanglements: Ornament as Method in Contemporary Kazakhstan

The essay approaches the intimate configurations captured in Kazakhstani artist Lidiya Blinova’s Finger Ornament as a site of artistic expression that reworks local ornamental production, dissolving categories of high and amateur, domestic and public, visual and haptic. In so doing, the essay highlights how the artwork accentuates the conceptual potential of its primary reference: the ornament of textile associated with the pre-Soviet culture of Kazakh nomads. In order to align with the artistic intention to foreground regional creative forms, the essay proposes a speculative turn: adopting a relational reading and an intertextual analysis between the artwork Finger Ornament and traditional textile ornamentation.