An independent Kazakhstani curator, lecturer, editor, and researcher. Y. Sorokina curates the digital archive “Astral Nomads” (since 2013) and heads the public foundation “Asia Art+.” Her work includes exhibitions, publications, graphics, installations, and video. Key methods in Y. Sorokina’s practice are curatorial research, academic analysis, interviews, cataloguing, and archiving. Key ideas are collective memory, cultural identity, and the preservation of heritage.

Y. Sorokina graduated from the Abai Kazakh Pedagogical Institute (Faculty of Art and Graphics, Almaty, 1987) and earned a PhD from the T. K. Zhurgenov Kazakh National Academy of Arts (Almaty, 2017). She currently teaches at the same academy, in the Department of Art Management and Producing.

In the 1990s, Y. Sorokina was active as an artist. Her works invited viewers to engage with and question what defines “contemporary art” and who creates it (“Line of Beauty,” 1999). She explored the notion of the “life path” by constructing spatial architectures and drawing parallels between Almaty’s Leta (life) and the ancient Greek Lethe (river of oblivion; “Future Айна-line,” 1998).

Y. Sorokina has conducted research and developed materials for digital archives through residencies such as the ArtsLink International Fellowships: US Residency (the Getty Research Institute, 2010) and Art Prospect Residencies (ArtGround, Sanati Muosir, 2018). Her project “Astral Nomads: Art of Post-Soviet Asia in the Flow of Time and Meanings” earned her the Berlin Weltaufenthalt Fellowship (Berlin, 2022–2023). As a co-curator, she has worked on major projects about Central Asian contemporary art, including “Re-Orientation” (the ACC Gallery, Weimar, 2002), “Musicstan: Media Generation of Contemporary Central Asian Artists” (the Central Asian Pavilion, 52nd Venice Biennale, 2007), and “Phantom Stories: Leitmotifs from Post-Soviet Asia” (the Kunsthalle Lund, Lund, 2018).

Y. Sorokina has published over 40 articles on art in Kazakhstani and international journals. Her academic works focus both on individual artists (Sorokina, Y. “Horizons of Transmediality: The Poetics of Saodat Ismailova.” Central Asian Journal of Art Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2023, pp. 119–132) and on the broader art history of Central Asia (Sorokina, Y. “Humanity Flow in Central-Asian Digital Art-History: The Astral Nomads Model.” Central Asian Journal of Art Studies, No. 2, 2021, pp. 65–76).

Information about Y. Sorokina is stored in the collection of the Documentation project – the archive of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art – Almaty (SCCA).

‍

Photograph provided by Yulia Sorokina