Ilya Sibiryakov is a Russian architect and artist who participates in various environmental exhibitions and biennales. Among them: the International Biennale of Environmental Art in Nizhny Novgorod, the Children's Archstoyanie, the St. Petersburg Economic Forum and others.
Ilya Sibiryakov actively uses an interdisciplinary approach, combining architecture, art and design to draw attention to environmental issues and search for innovative solutions in the field of sustainable development.
His works are often interactive, experimental in nature and aimed at involving viewers in the creative process.
The geography of creative and educational projects includes Russia (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Sakhalin, Baskunchak, Vladikavkaz...), Estonia (Tallinn), Kyrgyzstan, South Korea (Ansan), Montenegro.

Educational activities: He conducts creative workshops and webinars aimed at developing spatial and constructive thinking, as well as collective architectural and abstract performances to create art objects from various improvised materials.
Since 2018, he has been teaching regular online lessons for students from various countries in his fields of activity: spatial design, creation of art objects, and creative development.

Oksana Kapishnikova is an art historian, artist, researcher, and curator of art exhibitions. She works in the field of new museology (participatory museum) and research exhibition practice. During her career, Oksana has realized more than 20 research, exhibition, and educational projects. She is a co-founder of the Bishkek School of Contemporary Art. She is currently working as a curator at the Museum of Feminine and Queer Art. Since 2019, Oksana has served as the Executive Secretary of the National Committee of the International Council of Museums in Kyrgyzstan. Oksana’s interests include museums, art history, eco-art, cultural memory, and crafts.

sTo Len is a genre-fluid artist working in printmaking, installation, sound, video, and performance. He experiments with Suminagashi and Gyotaku techniques, turning them into collaborations with nature and platforms for environmental activism. His projects include working with rivers, transforming public spaces, recycling waste, and performing at Superfund sites. Based in Queens, NY, with roots in Vietnam and Virginia, Len weaves their histories, politics, and environments into his work. He was the first artist in residence at AlexRenew and a Public Artist in Residence at NYC’s sanitation department.
His work has been shown in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Australia. In 2004 he co-founded Cinders Gallery in Brooklyn, curating hundreds of shows and publishing zines. As a sound performer, he’s appeared at venues including MOMA PS1, New Museum, St. Marks Church, and Roulette in New York, as well as Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, and Hanoi stages.

Anton Polsky (Make) is an artist and academic interested in street art and socially engaged art practices. He teaches Art History at the Russian State University for the Humanities and is a co-founder and editor at Partizaning.org.

Anton Karmanov is artist and a multi-practitioner, living and working in Novosibirsk, Russia.
He has an education in political science and philosophy and practices music and theatre. Karmonov studied in The Rodchenko Art School in Moscow and in the Chto Delat School for Engaged Art in St. Petersburg. He is the co-founder and member of the cooperative На дне [Na dne, the Lower Depths] in Novosibirsk and an adviser to the city council of Novosibirsk (Urban planning). Karmonov is a member of Unmapping Eurasia.

Gracey Zhang is an award-winning illustrator, author, and animator with a BFA in Illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design. She received the Ezra Jack Keats Illustrator Award for her debut picture book, Lala’s Words. Her clients include The New York Times, NBC, NPR, VICE, and others. Gracey has also illustrated The Big Bath House, Nigel and The Moon, and The Upside Down Hat which was a recipient of The New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Book of 2022.

Born and raised in Vancouver, Canada, she has participated in artist residencies in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Angoulême, France. Gracey is now based in New York where she can be found working from her Brooklyn studio.

Sharareh Bajracharya is an art educator and currently the Director of Srijanalaya, an organization that works in arts education. She looks for systemic ways for the arts to foster the curiosities and joy of young children, young adults, and communities around them. She teaches at Kathmandu University Department of Art and Design, leading the specialization in the MFA program entitled Arts, Pedagogies, and Public Engagement. She has a passion for editing/producing picture books as counternarratives that build community and dissent. She was the past Director of the nonprofit art exhibition Kathmandu Triennale 2077 which took place in 2022.

Period of stay: 30 September 2025 - 5 October 2025

Gluklya, also known as Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya, is an artist working in Amsterdam and various other places , for now in Bishkek .
Her practice moves between performance, video, and social engagement — exploring how art can become a tool for care and gentle resistance.
Gluklya is known for her concept of fragility — not as weakness, but as an invisible force that unites people in times of injustice.
Through collective actions, she brings together artists, workers, and migrants to imagine new forms of solidarity.
In her current project, Carnival of Monsters, developed in Bishkek, Gluklya collaborates with sewing workers to explore automation, fear, and the meaning of care.
The women create textile sculptures and “inner dresses” — symbols of resilience, transformation, and tenderness amidst precarity.
Her previous works include The Utopian Unemployment Union and The Carnival of the Oppressed Feelings, presented at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, and at the 56th Venice Biennale curated by Okwui Enwezor.
Across all her projects, Gluklya invites us to listen — to the quiet voices of those who are rarely heard — and to dream of a world where care becomes a radical, collective act.

Artist and poet.

In 2011, he enrolled in the T. Sadykov Art Boarding School, and in 2013, he continued his education at the art college bearing the same name. He later spent several years teaching.

In 2017, Islamidin published a poetry collection titled "Erteń Kaira Jaz Kelet" ("Spring Will Return Tomorrow").
Since 2020, his paintings have been actively featured in national, international, and thematic exhibitions. He has participated in projects alongside artists from Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, France, and Germany.

Notable exhibitions include the solo projects "Meluun" (2022) and "Kara" (2024), as well as the "AB ZATS" exhibition (2025) at the Gapar Aitiev National Museum. His works are held in private collections and museum collections in Kyrgyzstan, including the National Museum of Fine Arts and the Tolon Museum.

In 2024, he became a junior researcher at the Gapar Aitiev National Museum.

Merel van Erpers Roijaards is a visual artist and costume designer from the Netherlands. Alongside her artistic practice, she works as a textile worker and seamstress. Her work moves across textiles, performance, and site specific installation, forming what she describes as an ongoing “frame story” that brings together narratives of modern and future folklore, bodies, queerness, murder ballads, and folk music traditions.

Her practice can be broadly understood through two interconnected strands. The first focuses on the human body through wearable works and costumes that often develop into performances, installations, or narrative environments. The second consists of what she calls “spatial costumes”: site specific textile or sculptural works designed for buildings, landscapes, and architectural spaces. These pieces emerge from research into the histories and stories of the sites they inhabit.

Van Erpers Roijaards approaches her body of work as parts of a larger evolving opera. Within this imagined structure, each object becomes a component of a stage world: sculptures function as props, wearable pieces as costumes, installations as scenography, and performances as scenes.

An artist and craftswoman interested in various creative fields. Organizer of the mobile art space "Plener Tut" in Bishkek for knowledge exchange between people with varying drawing experience.
Sculpting and drawing teacher.

Velislav Georgiev is a Bulgarian-born, Australian sculptor whose practice has been shaped by both ancient and contemporary Australian culture. His work spans public art, architectural commissions, drawing, and watercolour, exploring metaphor, allegory, and the social power of language. During his residency at Bulbul Art-Residence, he explored the cultural traditions influencing Kyrgyzstan's contemporary art scene, documenting his experiences through a series of drawings and watercolours while engaging in dialogue with local artists.

Student at Manas University, Artist, Designer

SeBoLLiN was born in Patagonia, in southern Argentina.

A graduate in Visual Arts from the National University of La Plata, he integrates his academic training with the realm of urban art.

His work uses hand figures as a compositional foundation, complemented by symbolic elements and metaphors. He seeks to prompt questioning and encourage free interpretation among viewers, rather than offering definitive conclusions.

Ivana Tkalčić is a multimedia artist and art researcher whose interdisciplinary practice explores the intersections of art, science, ecology, and technology.

Working across different media, she develops experimental projects that question our relationship with technology, the environment, and the world around us. Her practice often involves collaborations with scientists, artists, curators, and different institutions.

Her work has been presented internationally through exhibitions, biennials, and artist residencies across Europe, the USA, Asia, and beyond. Her awards and recognitions include the Contemporary Art Collection of the European Parliament, ART OMI: ARCHIVE, the Radoslav Putar Award finalist, and the HPB Grand Prix at the 35th Youth Salon.

Luke McDonald is an award-winning artist and teacher from Sydney, New South Wales. He has participated in group exhibitions and art prizes in Australia, Canada, winning People’s Choice Award at the 2020 artsPacific prize in British Colombia, Canada and the 2022 Arts in the Valley prize in New South Wales, Australia. He was also a resident at the Gracia GT Residency in Antigua, Guatemala in 2023. He has experience working with oil paints, woodcut printmaking, weaving, drawing and focuses on watercolours as a creative medium while travelling. Luke’s work is motivated by a restless energy to explore untapped painting locations, discover new interactions between light and form while investigating, respecting and critiquing the traditions of Western landscape painting. Recently, he has begun expanding his practice as he undertakes a series of fantasy/sci-fi graphic novels inspired by nomadism, alpine landscapes and Central Asian cultures and history.

Robyn - a Russian and Italian literature student entering her final year at Oxford. She came to Kyrgyzstan last year for two whole months and completely fell in love with the place. Thanks to Syinat and Ruslan, she was able to immerse herself in Kyrgyz culture and have so many incredible experiences. This year, she’ve come back to carry out research for her dissertation on Chyngyz Aitmatov, Kyrgyzstan’s national author.

Her dissertation focuses on Central Asian literature and identity through a comparative analysis of Aitmatov’s famous love story Jamilia and The Dead Lake by Hamid Ismailov, an Uzbek author who, in this work, writes about Kazakhstan. She will explore the development of Central Asian literary traditions, particularly the tension between writers’ desire to express and portray their own cultures and the fact that their works were written in the Russian language, and whether this affects or compromises the national identity expressed within these texts.

She will also examine how both authors approach similar themes, such as love, nature, and war, as well as the ways in which they portray their cultures through the symbolism of art and music. In particular, She is interested in the effort to protect national traditions and preserve a deep connection to the land in the face of Soviet pressure, particularly the emphasis on work, labour, and mechanisation. Through their stories of love and passion, both authors also explore the relationship between people and the natural world, and the ways in which this connection can be threatened by modernisation and the destruction of nature. She will consider how both works ultimately emphasise the power of cultural identity and the happiness that can be found in living according to our own hearts and souls, through engaging with art and the world around us, rather than allowing ourselves to become shaped by - and imprisoned by - the voices of war, political ideology, and mechanisation.