Artist & Photographer · Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
ELVIRA
SHARIF
I turn statistics and lived experience into material form. I work with what a society has learned not to see.
The work
To bear witness
My practice moves between data art, photography and textile. Violence held inside families. People who are passed by on the street. Lives lived inside institutions.
Before I called this an artistic practice, I spent years photographing as a volunteer in children's homes and homes for older people. What I learned there still governs how I work: it is possible to show a person in extreme circumstances without exploiting their suffering.
Not to speak on someone's behalf. Not to turn a life into an object of pity. To record the fact of a person's presence, and to ask the viewer not to walk past.
Selected works
Recognition
Where the work
has been
- 2025Tirek: The Thread of Her LifeNational History Museum of the Kyrgyz Republic, Bishkek · Almaty Gallery, Kazakhstan · catalogue
- 2024–25Art-Kazan data-art residencyUN Women “Making Every Woman and Girl Count” and School of Data · selected from over 200 applicants
- 2025The Astana Times · Kaktus.mediaIndependent press coverage in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan