Ravenous Remediation: Documentary to AI Imaging from Eurasia

This event is a screening of seven moving image works by artists engaging with the social, aesthetic, and political histories of Eurasia. For centuries, imperialism has attempted to impose an extracting gaze onto territories that comprise present-day Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and autonomous Russian territories such as Buryatia. As part of the Cleveland Humanities Festival, “Ravenous Remediation” highlights the potential of documentary film, data visualization, and new media to digest or metabolize states’ instrumentalization of visual representation. Moving image works by Aïda Adilbek, Altana Ayushieva, Nazira Karimi, and Aziza Kadyri offer new perspectives from Central Asia, Eastern Siberia, and transcontinental diaspora.

Narrative and Framework:
New forms of media often claim to improve the shortcomings of older visualization technologies: pixelated shadows are smoothed out while previously blurry subjects are pictured with more detail. In Remediation: Understanding New Media (1996), J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin describe the process of remediation by which “Each new medium is justified because it fills a lack or repairs a fault in its predecessor, because it fulfills the unkept promise of an older medium.” Despite the reparative potential of emergent visual technologies, legacies of imperial and colonial violence are often reinscribed in new forms of communication and remain uncorrected: social media spreads algorithms that divide communities, while AI images reproduce racial and gendered stereotypes based on biased image repositories.

“Ravenous Remediation” presents seven moving image works by artists who dive into these tensions between different technologies for visualization. New media might offer higher resolution, but how much do these advancements distract from visual baggage such as imperial stereotypes or state-sponsored erasure? The program’s works approach representation in a reflexive manner, metabolizing visual histories for which disruption is overdue.
The works included are designed to be viewed in a variety of interfaces: smartphones, theatres, and installations. By screening the works in a film theatre, “Ravenous Remediation” invites viewers to immerse themselves in these moving image and new media works while reflecting on how various display contexts might change their impact.

This event is curated by Ksenia Un, postdoctoral fellow at the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities and co-sponsored by Cinematheque at the Cleveland Institute of Art).  It is part of the Cleveland Humanities Festival: Appetite and is free and open to the public.

Registration is requested.  Register HERE.

About the Artists:

Nazira Karimi is an artist and filmmaker based in Central Asia. Her research-driven practice studies collective memory, grief, and the environmental transformations of the region, focusing on the aftershocks of colonization and war. Working across film and installation, she engages with oral histories, archival materials, and site-specific landscapes to uncover erased narratives and reimagine historical memory. She studied scenography and painting in Almaty and earned her Magistra degree in Vienna in 2024. Karimi is the director and co-founder of Ruyò Journal, a member of Davra Research Group, and a founding member of Mata Collective.

APAT (2023) explores extinction in the context of colonization and post-colonial existence, examining the impact of natural disasters, cultural loss, and memory erosion. Using found footage alongside Karimi’s family archives, the film tells a deeply personal history—a story yet to be reclaimed. Her journey mirrors both the coming of age and the independence of her people and region, reflecting the connection between personal memory and collective identity. Commissioned by Asian Film Archive.

Aïda Adilbek (based in Kazakhstan) is a multidisciplinary artist whose works explore womanhood and kinship through decolonial approaches to documentary cinema. With lighting and a high resolution that viewers might associate with contemporary documentaries, Adilbek’s Alaqan (2022) denies the ethnographic gaze by focusing on women’s hands as they make qurt, socialize over tea, and connect with loved ones on their smartphones.

Altana Ayushieva is a multimedia artist from Buryatia whose moving image works suspend imperial ontologies through the intransigence of Buryat temporalities and historical use of land. Taasy Point (2023) follows the artist’s journey from Ulaan-Ude to Taasy, the last village on the main road in the region. But Taasy isn’t just the end of the line—it’s also the birthplace of artist’s grandfather and place where only 3 people left because of meteorological station there. Power lines, streams of scientific data and memories of families who lived here intersect in this unremarkable remote place. Üder hünigui (2023) translates to “all day long” in Buryat. The film is a visual poem which challenges linear conceptions of time and translation.

Aziza Kadyri is an Uzbek multidisciplinary artist focusing on textiles, sculpture, new technologies, experimental costume and performance practices that create immersive experiences in digital and physical realms. Kadyri is also a co-founder of Qizlar, self-organized feminist collective grounded in principles of interdisciplinarity and intersectionality, as well as enacting social change. Designed to be viewed on a smartphone, Kadyri’s Self-Exoticisation Archives (2023-ongoing) trouble the hierarchization of artistic media, bodies, and gendered labor. In the video, the Kadyri stands still behind a moving slide projection of AI-enabled ornament, which the artist co-created with an AI generator using a curated database of suzani embroidery.