Within The Embassy of Mirrors, Faina Yunusova presents a participative installation that encourages active interaction. Drawing from her memories and incorporating found and AI-generated images, the installation constructs a multi-layered space, serving both as a backdrop for taking photographs and a place for reconsidering clichéd representations. Hence, elements traditionally associated with Central Asia, such as human and animal figures, fabrics, and motifs, undergo profound distortions, rendering them almost unrecognizable. They appear like mirages, resembling something familiar. Yet, these apparently understandable forms purposefully play up their ease of understanding, ultimately leaving viewers in a state of bewilderment.
The Embassy of Mirrors is the inaugural project of the embassy of, a series of self-organized gatherings, exhibitions, conversations, and meals within the spaces of the Cité internationale des arts lead by its resident, curator Sasha Baydal.
Faina Yunusova was born in 1991 in Tashkent, where she grew up. She studied monumental painting in Moscow and graduated from HfG Offenbach in 2022. She works with a wide variety of media: painting, AI, video, photography, etc. Her works deal with the creation of different identities and postcolonial heritage. In 2022 she was part of the program of the Uzbek Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. She is a member of the collectives Beyond the post-soviet and Steppe Space.
Sasha Baydal identifies as an Eastern European queer. Their work is rooted in displacement, memory and memory loss, as well as in the history of their family, which was subject to various forms of (forced) mobility. They consider their activities as a daily practice of recollection, remembering, and decolonization. In 2021, Baydal co-founded the collective Beyond the post-soviet.
Cover photo: Eugene Davudov
