Asia Bazdyrieva is a researcher and writer with a background in art history and analytical chemistry. She is currently an associate member of the Critical Media Lab Basel and Research Fellow at the Faculty of Media at the Bauhaus University of Weimar. She produces writing and artistic research, contributing to media theory, STS, and visual culture.
In recent years her focus has been on the relation between sociotechnical imaginaries and bodies and lands that are rendered as resources. In No Milk! No Love!, she argues that Ukraine's positioning in geopolitics is constructed by being rendered as territory identified for resourcification -- an operational space, where people and land become approached as objects of material transactions. In Micro Meso Macro— written during her residency at the Transmediale Festival in Berlin, — she deconstructs the sociotechnical imaginary of sustainability and demonstrates how current German energy policies have impacted Ukraine.
In 2018-2022 Bazdyrieva co-authored Geocinema— a documentary-led project that explored the infrastructures for Earth observation as co-producing forms of cinema. Geocinema has been nominated for the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research (2020), and the Golden Key prize in the Kassel film festival (2021).
She is an associate member of the Digital Democracies Institute (Simon Fraser University, Canada), where she contributed to research groups ‘Cyberwar Topologies,’ ‘Media, Infrastructure, Environment,’ Decolonial, Post-colonial and Post-Soviet,’ ‘Fascism, War, and Media,’ ‘Elemental Media/Weapon of War.’
Bazdyrieva was a Fulbright Fellow in 2015-2017 in The City University of New York.
- Visual Culture and Art History
- Media Theory
- Science and Technology Studies
- Environmental Humanities
Education:
- MA, Art History (2015-2017), The City University of New York (as Fulbright grantee)
- MSc, BSc Analytical Chemistry (2003-2009), Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv
Fellowships and stipends:
- Weltoffenes Berlin Residency at transmediale festival, funded by the Berlin Senate 2022-2023
- Digital Earth Fellowship, 2018-19, Hivos, NL
- The New Normal Fellowship, 2018, Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design Edmund S. Muskie stipend for internship at Storefront for Art and Architecture, 2017, USA
Selected Public Talks:
- Mental Geology of Nuclear Threat & The Labor of Witnessing. In conversation with Elena Vogman, Olexii Kuchanskyi, Svitlana Matviyenko, and Johannes Bruder, transmediale (Berlin), August 2023
- Yes, Russia is still an empire, but this won’t last long:Discussion with Ukrainian filmmaker Oleksiy Radynski and art historian Asia Bazdyrieva, UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies, April 2023
- Bodies as Lands: Resourcification as Method, Ukrainian Energy Series at NYU Jordan Center, April 2023
- Bodies as Lands: Resourcification as Method, Contamination, Art & the Environmental Condition- 2023 Symposium, Helsinki Biennial, March 2023
- Micro, Meso, Macro. Panel, transmediale, AdK, Berlin, February 2023
- Elemental Geograpgy and Geogilmmaking, www.facebook.com/events/3952518858173706/
- Jussi Parikka & Geocinema: Art from Large-Scale Systems: Operational Images and Geocinema, Berlin University of the Arts (Universität der Künste Berlin) Berlin, 2020
- Communicative Militarism, Symposium curated by Svitlana Matviyenko, The Black Cloud, Kyiv Biennial, 2019
- Living Networks with Jussi Parikka, Transmediale, Berlin, 2019
- Future of the Zone, curated by Metahaven, ICA, London, 2018
- Influencers Festival, CCCB, Barcelona, 2018
- The Politics and Poetics of Protest Art: A Roundtable with the Ukrainian and Russian Artists. Stanford University, Palo Alto, USA, 2017
Selected Publications
Essays:
Micro. Meso. Macro. Postscript. Aksioma 2023. https://aksioma.org/micro-meso-macro No Milk! No Love! e-flux journal #127, May 2022https://www.e-flux.com/journal/127/465214/no-milk-no-love/
Articles:
Bazdyrieva, Asia, Solveig Qu Suess, “Environmental Machines, Datified Earths” in Cyberwar Topologies, The Making of Post-American Internet, ed. Svitlana Matviyenko. Upcoming in 2025
Bazdyrieva Asia, Ivakhiv Adrian, Matviyenko Svitlana, “A Thousand Points of Golden Sunlight” in Spectral Futures, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath. Upcoming in 2024
Bazdyrieva, Asia, “The Mother of All Things,” Routledge Research in Art and Politics, Routledge, forthcoming, 2024
Bazdyrieva Asia, Kakhidze Alevtina, Notes on a Revolution (or at least a hope), in States of Statelessness, Errant Journal, #4, 2022
Bazdyrieva Asia, “of brushwood, reeds, and foil” in Dispatches Against Catastrophe, June 2022 https://againstcatastrophe.net/dispatch-1/of-brushwood-reeds-and-foil
Bazdyrieva Asia, “Ukraine and the Anthropocene: soil” (Ukr. “Україна і Антропоцен: земля”), Korydor, 2020
Bazdyrieva Asia, Solveig Qu Suess, “The Future Forecast”, New Silk Roads, e-flux Architecture, February 2020
Bazdyrieva Asia “Back and Down to Empty Landscapes: Notes on Ukraine’s Reverse Modernism” in Painting in Excess: Kyiv’s Art Revival, 1985-1993. Rutgers University Press: 2020
Reviews:
73rd Berlin International Film Festival, “Forum Expanded”, e-flux criticism 2023
https://www.e-flux.com/criticism/529815/73rd-berlin-international-film-festival-forum-expanded
Workshops & Teaching:
Geocinema: Earth Sensing as Filmmaking, visual culture seminar at Californian Institute of Technology, May 2023
Resourcification as Method, guest lecture for Decolonizing Architecture Advanced Studies (DAAS) at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, April 2023
Bodies as Lands—Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Spatial Arrangements in Eastern Europe, residency, curator. Nida Art Colony, Lithuania, March 13-26, 2023
Technological Earth Visions, Disembodied Landscapes. w/Johanna Zylinska and Max Liljefors, University of Southern Denmark, 2021
Diffracting Ecologies. Rethinking infrastructural relations in the Mediterranean beyond human scale, Guest lecture in workshop, Orient Institute, Beirut, 2021
Guest Lecture for MA students in Graphic communication design, Central St. Martins College, London, 2021
Architectures of Planetary Cinema, guest lecture in Advanced Urban, Greenwich University, London, 2020
Guest Lecture for BA students, "Visual Cultures of Imagining Earth", Center for Audiovisual Studies, FAMU, Prague, 2019
Workshop Signals and storms, Freeport 0, Matadero, Madrid, 2019
Geocinema Workshop, New York University Shanghai, China, 2019