A Borrowed Hand (2026) was presented by eastcontemporary at Art Basel, Basel in June 2026.

Aziza Kadyri's booth brings together six works - two wall-based textiles and four free-standing stands - that operate as distinct pieces and as one shared system. Developed from research begun in her solo exhibition Play Nice at Somerset House, the project places artificial intelligence at the centre of a live struggle over image-making, cultural memory, and authorship. At a moment when AI systems absorb visual traditions at scale and recirculate them as detached "style," Kadyri asks who gets to interpret inherited forms - and how communities might use those same systems to produce meaning on their own terms. 

Working at the intersection of material practice and creative technology, Kadyri turns to suzani, a Central Asian embroidery tradition that carries generations of women's knowledge through ornament and encoded symbolism - pattern logic executed stitch by stitch, a form of computation that predates the screen by centuries. Using a custom AI generators built on different visual models (Stable Diffusion, Z-Image, WAN) and LLMs, she enters a sustained visual exchange with that language. She begins with a traditional suzani pattern and feeds it into the system; the models read the image through its own visual logic and produce a response; she interprets that output, reworks it, and returns it. Through repeated cycles, the image drifts further from its source and closer to a new visual territory shaped by bias and mistranslation. AI sits at the centre of the work as a cultural actor and an unreliable translator. The work refuses both nostalgia and surrender. 

These stakes are not abstract. For regions like Central Asia, where representation already travels through uneven channels of visibility, the question of who interprets inherited forms carries real weight. Kadyri approaches AI as contested ground, where extraction and invention pull against each other, and asks whether a textile language rooted in collective memory can pass through machine vision and still arrive holding its agency, its complexity, its life in the present.