Aygul Sarsen

Sketches from the Brown, Salt, Aral, Amudarya, Muńlı Aral, and Umitlengen Aral series, 2026

Tús (Dream), 2026

Kutiw (Waiting), 2026

Umitlengen Aral, 2026

Aygul Sarsen grew up a few hundred kilometres from the former Aral shoreline. Never having seen the water hersell, Sarsen turns to portraiture to imagine the Aral as a feminine deity. Her sketches and paintings, in quick lines and gestural brushstrokes, capture various Karakalpak imaginaries of the water, personified as hybrid beings with wings, fins, or saxaul branches for hair. Tied to the female figure, here and across her practice, is the artist's own self-image as she navigates her positioning within the memories she inherited. Her work also enters into dialogue with previous generations' efforts to depict water; a key inspiration for Sarsen is Amudarya (1968) by Karakalpak artist Joldasbek Kuttymuratov, a sculpture of a goddess's head emerging from a tree trunk.

A tireless artist who paints, sculpts, and embroiders, making use of any material she has on hand - running out of canvas, she would work on paper, and without that the back of cardboard – Sarsen balances the playful and magical with a pensiveness borne out of approaching a subject one knows deeply and yet has never really encountered.