Nazira Karimi’s films tell women’s stories and explore Central Asian identity, memory, and land reappropriation impacted by Soviet colonisation. Karimi’s 2024 film Hafta (which translates as “seven” and “a week” from Tajik) is a seven-part video work narrating the artist’s ancestry. According to the Central Asian tradition called Jety-Ata (“seven grandfathers” in Kazakh), one has to know the names of seven direct blood grandfathers. Karimi instead imagines and tells stories of seven women from her maternal line, representing generations who lived through the dreadful episodes of Central Asian history. To make this film, Karimi has come a long way from Kazakhstan to Tajikistan and back, together with her mother, Mariam. They repeated the path of their family, depicted in Hafta, from displacement and migration along the Aral Sea and Syr Darya to their recent repatriation. In the receding waters and desiccating landscapes, Karimi finds the grief and mourning of all the losses the region has gone through.
This is the first time the work of Nazira Karimi is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Dana Iskakova
