Projects

Syldyr is a contemporary jewelry platform in Kazakhstan that I founded in 2024 together with co-curators Katia Rabey and Yevgenia Kazakova.

Syldyr

The platform brings together artists, curators, researchers, and institutions working in contemporary jewelry. Through exhibitions, educational initiatives, and international collaborations, Syldyr supports professional exchange, creates new opportunities for artists, and helps make contemporary jewelry more visible in the region.

Why Syldyr?

Syldyr is a Kazakh word meaning "chime" or "tinkling." It refers to the delicate sound of traditional silver hair jewelry called shashbau, whose gentle ringing announced a woman’s presence and, according to legend, protected her from evil spirits.

For the platform, this sound has become a metaphor. It represents jewelry as a visible presence, a voice.

Website: https://syldyr.net
Instagram: @syldyr_project

Treasure Island

Treasure Island was the first international exhibition of conceptual jewelry held in Astana and the inaugural project of Syldyr. The exhibition brought together 28 artists from 7 countries, including internationally recognised artists whose work has helped shape the field of contemporary jewelry.

Can a piece of jewelry retain its value if it is made not of gold, but from fragments of a car interior? What happens when termites become an artist’s collaborators? Can polyethylene film imitate Baroque pearls? The works presented in Treasure Island explored these questions while raising many others, inviting viewers to reflect on the nature of value, the status of objects, and the relationship between people and the world around them.

Date: September 19 – October 12, 2024
Venue: Forte Kulanshi Art Space, Astana, Kazakhstan

Jewelry is still most often perceived as a precious object, an investment, or an expensive gift. Treasure Island invited visitors to look at it differently — as an artistic medium in which ideas can be more valuable than the material itself.

Trying on Treasure

Trying on Treasure is a photographic project by Syldyr, developed from the international contemporary jewelry exhibition Treasure Island.

The project explores the moment when a piece of jewelry leaves the display case and meets the body. Through movement, gesture, scale and personal presence, the body completes the artwork and reveals meanings that cannot exist in the display case alone.

For the project, 38 women from Kazakhstan of different ages and professions were invited to wear works from the Treasure Island exhibition and reflect on their experience. Lena Sorokina’s photographs capture this first encounter between the wearer and the object — a moment of curiosity, hesitation and discovery, when both the jewelry and the body begin to transform one another.

The project was presented during Munich Jewelry Week (Schmuck) 2025, bringing contemporary jewelry from Kazakhstan into an international dialogue through photography, personal narratives, and the experience of wearing.

Date: March 2025
Venue: International Handwerksmesse (Schmuck), Munich, Germany

Jewelry Code:
Data as wearable art

The Jewelry Code: Data as Wearable Art explores how statistical data can be transformed into contemporary jewelry. Created within the Syldyr platform, the project focuses on material data art: artworks that translate data into physical objects that can be seen, touched, and even worn.

Each piece is based on real statistics, reflecting subjects such as health, migration, ecology, demography, culture, and personal experience.

Bringing together more than 60 artists from 28 countries, the exhibition presents jewelry as a medium for understanding the world—where numbers become material, and information takes on form, texture, and meaning.

The exhibition was first presented at the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan in 2025 and later shown during Munich Jewelry Week (Schmuck) in 2026, introducing international audiences to a dialogue between contemporary jewelry, data, and material practice.

Date: 2025, 2026
Venue: National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Astana;
International Handwerksmesse (Schmuck), Munich

Tirek: The Thread of Her Life

Tirek is a curatorial project, contemporary art exhibition that translates gender data into physical objects and visual narratives. Bringing together artists from Central Asia, the project explores how statistics can become a material for reflection, dialogue, and artistic expression.

In Turkic languages, tirek means support or pillar. Within the exhibition, it becomes a metaphor for the systems that shape women’s lives—both the invisible structures that sustain them and those that continue to reproduce inequality.

The exhibition presents works based on data related to femicide, gender-based violence, unequal access to education and employment, maternal mortality, migration, and cultural expectations placed on women across the region.

The project was organised within the framework of UN Women's regional programme Every Woman and Girl Matters, in partnership with the Central Asian Alliance to End Gender-Based Violence and the UN Women country office in Kazakhstan. It was exhibited in Bishkek in 2024 and in Almaty in 2025.

Tirek is also a space of hope. Making problems visible is the first step toward addressing them — and the exhibition invites not only reflection, but conversation, and the possibility of change.

Dates: 2024 — Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan; 2025 — Almaty, Kazakhstan
Organised by: UN Women / Every Woman and Girl Matters regional programme
Partners: Central Asian Alliance to End Gender-Based Violence; UN Women Kazakhstan country office