Asel Kadyrkhanova combines installation, embroidery, moving image, sound and drawing to confront what is termed ‘the post-Soviet condition’ of many, radically different societies, all emerging after 1989 from the repressed trauma and unexamined legacies of both Imperial Russian colonization and mid-twentieth century Stalinist totalitarianism. As a post-generation artist, she explores the paradox of the unspoken weight and cultural absence of the memory of a mass famine and the deporations to the gulags in Kazakhstan during the 1930s. In her hand-drawn animated film All the Dreams We Dream (2017-2020), the artist draws on childhood memories of travelling through the famine-ridden steppes that she has discovered in rare memoirs referencing the famine. Making drawings from their words exposes the artist herself to the traumatic horror she is bringing into visibility. Evocatively animated, the film takes us too on a journey over the deserted steppes in snowy moonlight, entering emptied yurts to encounter shocking, almost indecipherable chimeras created by starvation, clothed now in the compassion of her ‘aesthetic wit(h)nessing’.