Our People > Naima Morelli

Naima Morelli

Journalist

Naima is an arts writer and journalist specialized in contemporary art from Asia-Pacific and the MENA region. She has written for the Financial Times, Al-Jazeera, The Art Newspaper, ArtAsiaPacific, Internazionale and Il Manifesto, among others, and she is a regular contributor to Plural Art Mag, Middle East Monitor and Middle East Eye as well as writing curatorial texts for galleries. She is the author of three books on Southeast Asian contemporary art.

Articles

Exhibition Art and Culture Kyrgyz Art New York

Altynai Osmo’s New Show in New York: Restoring Female Narratives

In the heart of Tribeca in New York, the Sapar Contemporary Art Gallery has launched a new exhibition, Beneath the Earth and Above the Clouds, which brings Central Asian narratives to the forefront. This dual show – which runs until May 15, 2025 - features Altynai Osmo and Aya Shalkar, two artists who have been devoted to exploring female narratives in the region, and do this through works that are both steeped into tradition, and modern and vibrant at the same time. The Times of Central Asia spoke with Altynai Osmo, a multimedia artist from Kyrgyzstan whose work weaves the threads of nomadic heritage with contemporary expression. Born in Bishkek and nurtured by the serene shores of Lake Issyk-Kul, Osmo's artistic journey is deeply rooted in the traditions of her homeland. A graduate of Central Saint Martins in London, she seamlessly blends mediums — textiles, metals, video, and installation — to explore themes of identity, matriarchy, and the evolving role of women in Central Asian societies. Her works such as Blessing Yurt, a red fringed costume inspired by the Kyrgyz nomadic traditional dwelling, not only pay homage to ancestral practices but also challenges present-day socio-political narratives. Speaking with TCA, Osmo reflects on the layers of meaning in her new series, her enduring engagement with mythology and matriarchy, and how her practice bridges personal memory and collective history. [caption id="attachment_31131" align="aligncenter" width="2231"] Image courtesy of Altynai Osmo/Sapar Contemporary Art Gallery[/caption] TCA: Can you tell me about how your previous practice led to this new series for the show? My previous work has always involved exploring the intersections of feminine identity, cultural memory, and inherited spirituality in Central Asia, particularly in Kyrgyzstan. This new series evolved naturally from that foundation. It reflects a more layered and intentional engagement with Central Asian history, mythology and matriarchal histories — particularly the symbolic and spiritual dimensions that have often been erased, distorted and forgotten. The materials and narratives I use now draw more explicitly from the Kyrgyz epic, Manas, ancestral craftsmanship, and belief systems like Tengrism, allowing me to express deeper reflections on women's roles across time. TCA: Your Kyrk Kyz series reinterprets the legendary warrior women of Central Asia. How does this mythology resonate with contemporary Kyrgyz identity and gender roles? The Kyrk Kyz legend, with its origin in female strength and collective action, presents a striking contrast to the more patriarchal norms that dominate present-day Kyrgyz/Central Asian society. Revisiting these stories reminds us that women were once seen as the protectors of land, lineage, and cultural continuity. By reimagining these warriors through my art, I want to challenge modern gender expectations and inspire a reconnection to a more empowering view of womanhood that is already rooted in our collective past. [caption id="attachment_31132" align="aligncenter" width="2560"] Image courtesy of Altynai Osmo/Sapar Contemporary Art Gallery[/caption] TCA: The use of felt in your masks ties your work to nomadic traditions. How does the choice of materials reinforce the themes of your work? Felt is not just a...

4 days ago

Kazakh Art Art and Culture

Future Nostalgia: Alexander Ugay’s Parisian Debut at NIKA Project Space

Have you ever had that feeling of “Future Nostalgia” - as Dua Lipa would put it – when looking at old sci-fi movies that imagined a future that never came to pass? The fact that this future didn’t materialise might be as might be seen as both a blessing and a disappointment, as artist Alexander Ugay has us reflecting upon with his Parisian debut. Born in Kazakhstan to a Korean family deported under Stalin’s regime, Ugay’s work is heavily inspired by his own experience and is layered with echoes of ancestral trauma, the faded promise of Soviet modernity, and the flickering ghost of a future once imagined but that never fully came to fruition. A child of engineers and inventors, Ugay grew up among circuits and cyanotypes, and in his art, he uses materials such as 8mm film and VHS tape. With this vintage spirit, his body of work looks at the past to speak of the present, and posits a critique of the techno-utopianism of the Soviet 1970s, as much as today's AI-driven image culture. In his new show, More than Dreams, Less than Things, at NIKA Project Space Paris, Ugay looks at the origins of image-making both literally and philosophically. Inspired by Ibn al-Haytham’s Book of Optics, the artist reanimates the ancient camera obscura, letting light seep through the book’s pages to birth abstract images: faded records of a presence. The exhibition, which opened on March 16, explores the tension between technological progress and the way this can be disrupted by the power of imagination and poetry - eminently human things - by looking at the intersection of photography, technology, and diasporic memory. His show, curated by Elena Sorokina, situates an emergence of Central Asian narratives coming more and more to the forefront of the international art and cultural world of Europe. Through the lens of Soviet futurism, Ugay explores a broader vision of seeing in an age where so much remains invisible. TCA spoke with Ugay about the way he approaches his art, his sources, and how he conceives images not as finished objects but as processes — mutable, unstable, and deeply human. [caption id="attachment_30561" align="aligncenter" width="2560"] 03_Alexander Ugay, More than Dreams, Less than Things. Courtesy of the artist[/caption] TCA: Where does the title for your new show, More than Dreams, Less than Things, come from? The title came about after reading Henri Bergson's book, Matter and Memory. I really liked the idea that an image is not only the relationship between absence and presence but also intensity and density. This idea made up for my dissatisfaction with the notion of resolution in photography. The title, in this case, is not just a definition of the image but a key to understanding its substantive basis. The image is the surface of the ‘grand contract’ between necessity and freedom, memory and matter, entropy and being. TCA: In More than Dreams, Less than Things, you use the camera obscura technique. How does this historical process relate to your exploration...

3 weeks ago

Uzbek Art Venice Biennale Art and Culture

Uzbekistan at the 2025 Venice Biennale: Ekaterina Golovatyuk on the Modernist Legacy of a Soviet-Era Solar Furnace

Is it possible to preserve architectural heritage while working towards sustainability? And what to make of the architectural relics of the past century? Can they somehow take on new meaning rather than remaining a representation of dystopias and utopias of the past? All these questions and more are addressed by the Uzbekistan Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. Running alternate years with the Art Biennale, this is undoubtedly one of the most important architectural events in the international arena. Promising to be a thought-provoking exploration of Soviet-era scientific ambition, modernist architectural heritage, and the challenges of sustainability in a rapidly changing world, the pavilion hosts the research of GRACE studio - an architectural firm established by Ekaterina Golovatyuk and Giacomo Cantoni - which operates at the intersection of built heritage, contemporary urbanism, and cultural production. Commissioned by the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF), the pavilion responds to the theme of the Biennale’s curator, Carlo Ratti’s overarching Biennale concept of 'Intelligens'. The pavilion focuses on the Sun Institute of Material Science, originally known as the Sun Heliocomplex, a vast Soviet-era solar furnace built outside Tashkent during the Cold War to test materials at high temperatures. What emerges is the paradox of a structure designed for technological advancement that now faces questions of obsolescence and adaptation in contemporary discourse. TCA spoke with Ekaterina Golovatyuk to understand how the pavilion evolved from years of research into Tashkent’s modernist legacy and why this solar furnace has become the focal point of Uzbekistan’s presence at the Biennale. [caption id="attachment_30103" align="aligncenter" width="2560"] Heliocomplex Sun, field of heliostats, Tashkent, Uzbekistan; image: Armin Linke[/caption] TCA: The Uzbekistan Pavilion for the 2025 Venice Biennale builds on your previous research, Tashkent Modernism XX/XXI. Can you tell us how this project began? This is a project commissioned and initiated by Gayane Umerova of the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation that works with cultural heritage, museums, and other culture-related initiatives in Uzbekistan but also promotes Uzbekistan’s culture abroad. They have curated large exhibitions in the Louvre, in the British Museum, showing historical artifacts from Uzbekistan, but also art of the 20th century, and Tashkent Modernism is part of their mission in regards to architecture. The Tashkent Modernism XX/XXI project began in 2021, when it became clear that Tashkent had started to change so rapidly that special tools had to be put in place in order to protect the recent architectural heritage that, at the time, was mostly not listed and therefore at risk. Our project team consisted of multiple experts from Uzbekistan and abroad, including a historian, Boris Chukhovich, a team of preservation specialists from Politecnico di Milano led by Davide Del Curto, urbanists Laboratorio Permanente, and an artist [photographer], Armin Linke. For this project, we started by selecting 40 buildings and then narrowed it down to 24, for which we created monographs and statements of significance that described the important values of the building as well as what parts should be absolutely kept and what parts could...

1 month ago

Central Asian Art Art and Culture

Interview With Sara Raza – Director of the Tashkent Centre for Contemporary Art

Sara Raza is a litmus test for the spirit of the times in the shape of an art curator. In simple terms, art crowds can count on her direction for the Tashkent Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) to bring the most pressing issues in contemporary art to the foreground. Indeed, the author of the book Punk Orientalism - and the namesake curatorial studio - has been just appointed as Artistic Director and Chief Curatorial Director of the CCA Tashkent, set to open in September 2025. It’s a strategic move for the Centre, which has aspirations of becoming a global arts and culture hub and is aiming at international artistic and creative exchanges, which include residencies, exhibitions, workshops, and educational programmes, and contributing to Uzbekistan’s cultural ecosystem. Transversal in her curatorial approach, London-born, New-York-based Raza is coming from a mixed Central Asian/Middle Eastern background, but she is also steeped in the heart of the Western art system, in institutions such as the Guggenheim – having taken care of a project called UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, curating the Middle East and North Africa section. Over the years, the curator has worked with artists from Asia, the Caucasus, the Middle East, Europe, and North America, and has curated shows at the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha and the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, but it is truly her book, Punk Orientalism: The Art of Rebellion, which brought a fresh approach to the sometimes highly academic field of art criticism. For Raza, artists from the former-Soviet countries and beyond hold a strong punk DIY ethos, by which they counter the Orientalist gaze they have always been subjected to by both the West and Russia. Their art is often a form of bricolage, an unexpected connection of disparate ideas used to create something entirely new. Will she bring this original approach to the direction of the museum, too? TCA spoke with Raza to find out about how she’s planning to foster cultural and educational partnerships and to support local, regional, and international artists while engaging with Uzbekistan’s rich cultural heritage. [caption id="attachment_29451" align="aligncenter" width="2560"] Centre for Contemporary Art Tashkent Artist Residencies; image: Namuna[/caption] TCA: The Centre for Contemporary Art in Tashkent is poised to become a major hub for artistic discourse in Central Asia. As its first Artistic Director and Chief Curator, how do you envision defining the institution’s identity from the ground up? My vision for CCA is less of a ground up approach, but rather one that builds on an historical and visual cultural foundation established in the 20th century that included a robust relationship with artists, intellectuals and others from the Global Majority World [a collective term for people of African, Asian, indigenous, Latin American, or mixed-heritage backgrounds, who constitute approximately 85% of the global population]. This included relationships between Harlem Renaissance figures [The Harlem Renaissance was an African American cultural movement that flourished in the 1920s and had Harlem in New York City as its symbolic...

2 months ago

Cultural Heritage Central Asian Art Art and Culture

Simurgh Self-Help: Slavs and Tatars’ New Show Rethinks National Symbolism

“It’s interesting that in Western symbolism you never see a delicate female eagle,” notes Payam, one-half of the artist collective Slavs and Tatars, from his studio in Berlin. “But the central-Asian Simurgh is gender-fluid, metaphysical. It doesn’t belong to this world.” The mythological figure of the Simurgh is the focus of Slavs and Tatars’ latest show at the gallery The Third Line in Dubai called “Simurgh Self-Help”. The show speaks of the importance of reclaiming and reframing cultural memories in a fractured world, and an invitation to think beyond the artificial, top-down confines of nationalism, to find cultural unity. [caption id="attachment_28951" align="aligncenter" width="2560"] Slavs and Tatars Samovar Vacuum-formed plastic, acrylic paint; Image: Courtesy of the artist and The Third Line, Dubai[/caption] The exhibition extends a lineage of conceptual inquiry, drawing upon the mystical bird Simurgh, ever-present in Persian and Central Asia mythologies, as a counterpoint to the ubiquitous, secularized eagle of Western heraldry. A constant companion of Zeus in Greek mythology, the eagle is a recurring symbol in the Western world: “Everywhere you look in the West, you find eagles,” notes Payam. “It’s on the German flag, on American football teams, on the Albanian flag. It’s a tired, secularized symbol, heavy with the weight of imperial history.” In contrast, the Simurgh exists on a different plane, one that rejects hierarchies in favor of collective transformation. [caption id="attachment_28952" align="aligncenter" width="1874"] Slavs and Tatars Samovar Vacuum-formed plastic, acrylic paint; Image: Courtesy of the artist and The Third Line, Dubai[/caption] Today the Simurgh is going through a similar secularization to the Western eagle, with Turkish SIM cards and Azerbaijani soccer teams called Simurgh. "It's easy, in some sense, for as an artist to take something which is very high and important, let's say spiritual or religious, and make it make fun of it, bring it down in a caricatural way,” says Payam. “What's very hard as an artist is to take something which has been debased and make it high again." In the show, we see works that go in either direction, presenting an alternative mythology, one that shows that cultures are fluid and interconnected. “Simurgh Self-Help,” which had previous iterations in Warsaw, Athens, and Baden-Baden, was originally started two years ago as a conceptual echo of Marcel Broodthaers’ Musée d'Art Moderne: Département des Aigles. This was a conceptual museum/artistic project created by the Belgian artist in 1968, full of artworks referenced by Slavs and Tatars in their show. [caption id="attachment_28953" align="aligncenter" width="2500"] Slavs and Tatars, Soft Power_2023, Woolen Yarn; Image: Courtesy of the artist and The Third Line, Dubai[/caption] The Simurgh, Payam explains, traverses territories from Kazakhstan to Ukraine, yet remains absent in Poland. “It’s a question of defining a region not through imposed political structures but through the myths that bubble from the ground up,” remarks Payam. The Simurgh becomes a cipher for alternative cartographies, a challenge to the top-down imposition of nationhood. If the eagle stands for conquest and dominance, the Simurgh stands for the dissolution of categories and unity...

2 months ago