Azadbek Bekchanov (b. 1996) is an Uzbek/Swiss artist working between Lausanne and Bucharest. His artistic practice examines the relationships between technology and mysticism, approaching them as intertwined regimes of knowledge and experience shaped by capitalist infrastructures. Engaging with these entanglements, his work considers how technical apparatuses and spiritual epistemologies co-produce forms of perception, belief, and temporality. 

Grounded in a critique of Western modernity informed by decolonial theory, Azadbek develops forms influenced by mystical epistemologies rooted in religious practices; for him, this practice is an attempt to expand sensitive and political horizons, anchored in the responsibility that artists carry. For several years, Azadbek has been questioning what it means to develop an artistic practice situated within the decolonial field, and under what conditions an aesthetics of decoloniality can emerge. This question feels all the more urgent given that the political dimension of culture is too often reduced to logics of representational politics. Instead, he finds it necessary to revalue a materialist approach to the means of artistic production, as well as sensitivity, affect, and relationality as tools for emancipation.

Azadbek holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from HEAD (Genève) and a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from Institut Art Gender Nature HGK (Basel).
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Tuman‍

Print on cotton drill, performance (2023–2026)

Being born in Uzbekistan, and departed his native country while still being an infant, Azadbek returned to Central Asia for the research trip last year, as he was invited to commission an artwork and performance for Rites of Eternal Wind. After spending two weeks in the region it was clear to Azadbek that instead of producing a new work, he should rather take one of the existing ones as he found the right context to it. 

The process led to presenting a new iteration of Tuman, an installation in which Azadbek uses a fragment of scanned suzani in a fluid, unstable motion, reprinting it onto a long cotton textile. Initially informed by an interest in how digital technologies have transformed the status, circulation, and materiality of images — where images become mutable, layered, and continuously recontextualized — the work departs from these concerns to explore other regimes of meaning. 

The textile is thus reconfigured as a graphical score for a music performance. 

What began as a reflection on how reproductive methods in conceptual art transform and circulate images, sometimes obscuring their origins, evolves into an interpretative space where ornaments — even when altered through technological processes — operate as directions and instructions. In this shift, the image is no longer only a surface of circulation, but becomes a site of transmission, where visual forms are activated as sound, opening the work to new temporalities and modes of reading.

Azadbek’s research trip to Almaty was supported by the Pro Helvetia Foundation.