Biography
Khulkar Yunusova (b. 1988, Tashkent, Uzbekistan) is a French-Uzbek interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and author based in Vaux-sur-Seine near Paris. Working across installation, drawing, textile, artist’s books, video and performative situations, her practice investigates how invisible structures — language, memory and inherited systems of meaning — acquire material and spatial form.
Moving between Central Asian and European cultural contexts, Yunusova approaches language, ritual gesture, textile and ornament not as fixed cultural symbols, but as structures shaped by repetition, displacement and translation. Recurring elements such as the silent French letter H and the Minotaur function as navigational devices through which she explores thresholds, orientation, absence and the ways bodies negotiate space.
Initially trained in economics, Yunusova worked for several years in the pharmaceutical sector, including pediatric oncology. These experiences contributed to an ongoing investigation into fragility, disappearance and the forms through which memory persists.
Her work has been presented through exhibitions, installations, conferences, and interdisciplinary projects in France and internationally, including UNESCO in Paris, Palais Jacques Cœur in Bourges, the Winckelmann Museum in Germany.
Her works are part of the collections of the Ruhsor Museum of Contemporary Art, the Winckelmann Museum, and the Maison de George Sand.
Artistic Statement
My practice investigates how invisible structures — language, memory, inherited systems of meaning and vernacular knowledge — acquire bodies, organize space, and shape the ways we orient ourselves.
Working across drawing, textile, installation, artist’s books, photography, video and performative situations, I approach language and cultural forms not simply as means of representation, but as architectures: systems capable of producing boundaries, directing bodies and shaping perception.
My research often begins with an unstable or incomplete element — a silent letter, a fragmented memory, an inherited textile, a ritual gesture, an interrupted ornament, a proverb — and follows its transformation as it moves between languages, materials, generations and spaces.
The French letter H, for instance, entered my work through its paradoxical condition: visually present yet sometimes phonetically absent. What began as a linguistic instability gradually became spatial, eventually opening onto the recurring figure of the Minotaur — a body navigating thresholds, passages, orientation and disorientation.
Moving between French and Uzbek cultural contexts has shaped my relationship to memory, textile and transmission. I approach proverbs, rituals, domestic gestures, ornament and storytelling not as fixed forms of heritage, but as living structures through which knowledge and belonging are carried, transformed and sometimes interrupted across generations.
Across these different forms, I am interested in the passage from the immaterial to the material: the moment when language becomes architecture, memory becomes an object, ornament becomes a system, or repetition becomes a bodily protocol.
My work asks how cultural, linguistic and emotional structures continue to shape our movements and perceptions even when the systems that produced them have become unstable or disappeared.
What happens when the structures through which we orient ourselves become unstable?
Exhibitions (selected)
2025 — Kaukokaipuu, Re:location, Biarritz, France
2025 — a-s-t-r-a gallery Open Call, vol.6, curator Svetlana Taylor
2025 — “Antiquity and Young Art”, Winckelmann Museum, Germany
2024 — Maternal Instinct Project, group exhibition “Mirror of the World”, Medersa Dusmatbai, Samarkand, Uzbekistan
2023 — Le Protagoniste, Museum of Contemporary Art of Urgench, Uzbekistan
2021 — MESSAGE, Palais Jacques Cœur, France
2021 — H comme Homme, Samarkand, Uzbekistan
2019 — Art sans frontières, UNESCO, Paris, France
2019 — Bukhara State Museum, project Dialogue, Uzbekistan
2018 — International Biennale of Contemporary Art, Tashkent, Uzbekistan
