Responding to the V&A’s historic suzani collection, Aziza Kadyri reimagines the textile tradition through the new commission Sender Unknown, a shifting installation exploring the intersection of AI, art and craft.

The art of suzani – intricately hand-embroidered textiles traditionally made for a bride’s dowry – is one of Uzbekistan’s most significant cultural traditions. While suzani itself has long evolved through shared cultural exchange, AI models introduce a different kind of borrowing – one that can strip away layers of context, disconnecting images of the embroideries from the lived experiences that produced them: women’s labour, migration, and intergenerational knowledge. By absorbing images into datasets, authorship disappears, contexts collapse and meaning becomes simply pattern. 

Moving between handcrafted and digital processes, Sender Unknown addresses this uncertainty and asks whether technologies that risk erasing histories can instead be reimagined as tools for preservation and reinterpretation. 

Sender Unknown combines suzani (embroidery) techniques with digital textile printing, evoking deconstructed sense of information transmission. Using a bespoke AI model, the artists developed a new language of suzani symbols. Female artisans in Nurota, Uzbekistan, hand-embroidered these contemporary motifs. 

The display is part of the V&A’s Jameel Programme, celebrating 20 years of The Jameel Gallery with Community Jameel.  

With further support from the Sarikhani Family.