About Artist
Gaisha Madanova (1987) is an artist born in Kazakhstan. Her practice spans visual art, curatorial work, and independent cultural infrastructure. She is based between Almaty and Berlin.
She studied Architecture at the Almaty College of Construction and Management, graduating in 2009, and later attended the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, where she studied under Prof. Hermann Pitz (Diploma, 2012–18) and in the project class of Prof. Julian Rosefeldt in Digital and Time-based Media (2016–18). In 2019–20, she participated in WHW Akademija in Zagreb, founded by the curatorial collective What, How & for Whom/WHW.
Working across printmaking, objects, digital media, and installation, Madanova’s practice engages questions of perception, embodiment, transformation, and displacement. Alongside her artistic work, she has developed curatorial and editorial initiatives in Kazakhstan and internationally. She is a founding member of Artpologist (2007) and the ROUNDABOUT collective (Munich, 2014), co-founder of the ARTCOM platform (Almaty, 2016), and founder and editor-in-chief of ALUAN, the first conceptual art magazine in Kazakhstan (2015). Her curatorial projects include VIDEO[ARTiFACT] (Goethe-Institut, Almaty), mikro[smART]raiony (Artbat Fest, Almaty), DIYALOG: New Energies (Vienna), and the video program Internal Storage — Not Enough Space? for the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Astana, Moscow, Almaty).