Julia Kiryanova (Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

Julia Kiryanova (born Юлия Миниахметова) was born in Derzhavinsk, Kazakhstan, and raised in Bashkortostan, growing up Tatar-Bashkir in a Muslim-majority republic and within a family spanning Muslim and Orthodox lines, while neither being religious nor pressured to belong to either faith. Belonging was never singular: she was visibly part of a place, an ethnicity, and a faith-shaped culture, while simultaneously standing slightly apart from each.

She grew up across territories whose political borders were constructed through Soviet administrative systems rather than reflecting singular ethnic identities. Bashkortostan remained a republic within the Russian Federation, while Kazakhstan became an independent nation following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although politically distinct today, both territories were shaped by the same twentieth-century project of territorial and administrative reorganization.

Growing up between these contexts made identity feel less like a stable inheritance than a political designation, in which ethnicity, nationality, and belonging were continually mediated by borders and state structures. Rather than providing a singular sense of origin, this condition revealed how identities are assigned, negotiated, and transformed through geopolitical frameworks.

After completing her art studies in Sterlitamak, Kiryanova chose not to follow the expected trajectory through the imperial centre. Instead, she moved directly to the edge of a different political and cultural system, living and working in Scandinavia and later in the Netherlands. This migration was also a refusal of the hierarchy that positions the metropolitan centre as the inevitable destination: she left without ever passing through the place that claimed to define her belonging.

This experience of displacement became a foundation of Kiryanova’s artistic research. Her work returns to questions of identity, the body, existence, and the search for belonging and home. Through material, narrative, and embodied processes, she explores how personal histories intersect with collective memory and how spaces of meaning can be constructed in response to instability and transition.

Kiryanova develops immersive environments in which painting, tapestry, spatial installation, live sound, and durational performance unfold as a single evolving work. Working across these interconnected forms, she creates large-scale environments activated through collective performances involving body-painted and nude performers. Rather than functioning as separate disciplines, painting, tapestry, choreography, and sound operate as parts of one spatial system in continuous transformation.

The body is approached not as an image but as living material that shapes and is shaped by its surroundings. Through duration, repetition, and collective presence, the work explores vulnerability, fragility, intimacy, and the shifting relationships between bodies, space, and material. Painted surfaces, textiles, and architectural elements accumulate traces of each activation, allowing every project to evolve over time.

Each installation responds to its site while continuing an ongoing investigation into how shared environments can generate new forms of perception, encounter, and collective experience.