Interview with Zumrad Mirzalieva

In this podcast recorded in March 2026, Sven Spieker speaks with artist Zumrad Mirsalieva about her practice and her work with Davra research collective. The collective was started in 2021 by artist Saodat Ismailova as an independent platform for artistic research, public programming, publishing, and commissioning focused on Central Asia. The group aims to respond to a lack of sustained artist-led structures in the region capable of supporting indigenous knowledge production, critical exchange, and long-term collaborations. Since then, Davra has developed a body of work across publishing, moving image exhibition, screenings, and educational formats. For example, the collective organized a public event during Saodat Ismailova’s participation in documenta fifteen; published Chilltan: Shapeshifting Eternal Spirits from Central Asia; and produced the essay films Tashkent 58-88 (dir. Zumrad Mirzalieva) and Whose Voice Is It? (dir. Dana Iskakova). The collective has also organized number of screenings, including at the Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam and the Centre Pompidou, and developed the collective installation Taming Waters and Women of Soviet Central Asia that premiered at the Biennale Matter of Art in Prague in 2024 and later traveled to Lahore, and that has been acquired by Muzeum sztuki in Łódź.

Currently the collective is prioritizing its field-building role through educational and publishing initiatives, including research labs, workshops, and public conversations centered on the Syr Daria river. These formats are important to the group because they help respond to gaps in contemporary art infrastructure and critical discourse in and about Central Asia.

Sven Spieker

Sven Spieker teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and specializes in modern and contemporary art, aesthetic and critical theory, and global and transnational art and art history. Spieker is the founding editor of ARTMargins and a co-founder of the Working Group Cultures of World Socialism. His book publications include The Big Archive. Art from Bureaucracy (MIT Press, 2008); Destruction (ed., MIT Press, 2017); Akusmatik als Labor: Kultur/Kunst/Medien (co-ed., Königshausen&Neumann, 2023); Art as Demonstration: A Revolutionary Recasting of Knowledge (MIT Press, 2024). Forthcoming: Socialist Exhibition Cultures. International Art Exhibitions in the Socialist World, 1950-1990 (ed., Toronto University Press).

Zumrad Mirzalieva

Zumrad Mirzalieva is based in Uzbekistan and the USA. She is a visual artist, researcher and cultural programmer working with photography and the moving image. Her practice sits across curatorial research, public programming, writing and artistic production, with a particular focus on ecology, extraction, speculative futures, and solidarity and agency. She  has worked across both independent and institutional contexts, building research based programs, screenings, commissions and international collaborations, including Tashkent 58-88, an essay film revisiting the Tashkent Film Festival of Asian African and Latin American Countries. She has also done curatorial and research work around the intersection of water and imagined futures in the region, including the exhibition Between the Two Rivers, the collective installation Taming Women and Waters in Soviet Central Asia, and the photography project Through Sands and Dreams. Mirzalieva is one of the directors of Davra research collective, a recent resident at Fabrica Research Centre, and a Magnum Foundations Fellow.