Medina Bazarğali is an Almaty-based artist, developer, curator, and researcher who uses artistic methods to reimagine the epistemologies of modernity and hijack their formal structures — often by refurbishing their own tools. Born and raised in a family of artists, she was immersed in cultural practice from a young age; however, she chose a different path and completed her training in software engineering. Working within enclosed, rigid digital infrastructures led her to reassess how neoliberal capitalism uses re—post—colonial conditions in countries of the Global Majority to turn knowledge into datasets and fragment centuries-old cultures into lists of algorithms. Resisting the reduction of her identity to a combination of ones and zeros, Medina turned her attention to hacking, open-source software, digital interventions, and eventually to mixed-media and sonic arts. 

One of her main artistic tools is live coding, which she conceptually reconfigures as a contemporary form of the ancient Kazakh/Turkic art of poetic improvisation. For Medina, these seemingly different practices not only follow the same functional logic as processes of spontaneous creation but, more importantly, operate within the same autochthonous ways of knowing. Interested in the digital revolution, cultural memory, the poetics and politics of technology, and the fluidity of Kazakh identity, she foregrounds artistic methods as both a social, communal practice and a means of engaging with human nature at a deep, pre-cognitive level. 

Medina’s work circulates across Central Asia and internationally, appearing in exhibitions, festivals, performance programs, and educational contexts, as sharing knowledge with peers is central to her practice. As a curator, she engages with diverse contexts, both conceptually and formally — from punk/DIY exhibitions, likely a legacy of her parents, to music and film festivals such as Jaña Şekara (“A New Border”), a feature film festival dedicated to stories from East Turkestan.