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For those who choose joy

Khulkar Yunusova

I am an Uzbek–French artist.
Not by theme, but by life.

I was born between languages, gestures, and ways of caring.
Uzbekistan lives in me as memory, ritual, silence, and warmth.
France shaped my gaze — structure, distance, form, and visibility.

My work exists where these two worlds do not merge politely,
but rub against each other, creating tension, poetry, and truth.
Before fully committing to art, I worked in pediatric oncology.
There, I learned that beauty is not decoration.
Today, my practice unfolds through drawing, textile, and ritual gestures.
I create works that are meant to be lived with — worn, held, carried.
Art as a companion, not an object of domination.

Motherhood transformed my rhythm and my perception of time.

My work speaks about the feminine body, memory, transmission,
and the fragile dialogue between East and West —
not as an identity statement,
but as a lived condition.
I believe joy is not innocence.
It is resistance.
And living, like art,
is a conscious act.

Khulkar Yunusova
Stepping into Daido Moriyama's exhibition Lettres d'amour à la photographie at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, one might initially assume they are entering a retrospective devoted to one of Japan's most influential photographers of the twentieth century. Iconic black-and-white prints, contact sheets, vintage cameras, books, magazines, film negatives and personal archives all seem to tell the familiar story of an artist's life. Yet it quickly becomes apparent that this exhibition is about something else. It is less a portrait of Moriyama than a portrait of photography itself—or rather, of a lifelong love affair between an artist and a medium that he continuously embraces, challenges, dismantles and reinvents. For much of its history, Western photography has been built upon the idea of preservation. From family albums to museum archives, photography has been understood as a tool for resisting disappearance. It promises to stop time, preserve a face, and prove that someone once existed. Roland Barthes famously described every photograph in Camera Lucida as evidence that "that-has-been." A photograph becomes almost a legal document of memory. Moriyama seems to answer Barthes with a radically different proposition: photography preserves nothing. It simply makes disappearance visible. This idea runs throughout the exhibition. It becomes especially clear in Moriyama's legendary photobook Shashin yo Sayonara (Farewell, Photography), published in 1972. Even the title sounds paradoxical. How can one say farewell to photography while continuing to photograph for the rest of one's life? The farewell is not addressed to the medium itself, but to the illusion that photography offers transparent access to reality. Moriyama embraces blur, overexposure, grain, accident, scratches and imperfect framing—everything classical photography has traditionally dismissed as failure. 🎨 Art is not only something we look at. It is another way of seeing the world. On this channel, I share my reflections on contemporary art, exhibitions, photography, museums, and the ideas that shape our perception of memory, identity, childhood, culture, and everyday life. Every exhibition begins with the same question: You see... I see... Because every artwork tells two stories: the one we immediately recognize, and the one we discover when we learn to look a little longer. 🖋️ Read more of my essays and artistic projects: https://stellapolare.fr/ 🧣 Discover my silk scarf collection, inspired by art, memory, and everyday beauty: https://stellapolare.fr/product-category/designer-scarves/silk-scarves/ 🗼 Exploring museums and exhibitions in Paris: https://www.tiqets.com/en/things-to-do-in-paris-c66746/ 📩 Work with me / Curatorial collaborations / Speaking: khulkar.yunusova@gmail.com #ContemporaryArt #ArtCriticism #MuseumReview #ArtEssay #VisualCulture #Photography #ArtHistory #ExhibitionReview #ContemporaryPhotography #MuseumDiaries #Culture #Artists #VisualThinking #YouSeeISee #ArtWriter #ArtResearch #EastMeetsWest #Memory #Identity #PhilosophyOfArt #KhulkarYunusova #StellaPolareArtiste
You See Photography. I See a Living Being Learning How to Disappear.
💛 If you also question yourself as a parent, you're not alone. Share your thoughts in the comments. 📥 Download my free guide: 10 Questions You're Allowed to Doubt as a Mother — because sometimes asking the question is already an act of love. https://stellapolare.fr/10-question-for-doubting-mother/ Because doubting doesn't make you a weaker parent. Sometimes, it is what keeps love attentive. 🧣 Discover my silk scarf collection, inspired by art, memory, and everyday beauty: https://stellapolare.fr/product-category/designer-scarves/silk-scarves/mother-love-silk-scarves/ 🗼 Exploring Paris with me: https://www.tiqets.com/en/things-to-do-in-paris-c66746/ 📩 Work with me / Collaborations: khulkar.yunusova@gmail.com #Motherhood #Parenting #GoodMother #MomLife #ParentingJourney #Family #SelfReflection #MotherhoodUnfiltered #GentleParenting #DoubtingMother
today is my baby 's burrhday
23 juillet 2026
On the Practice of Oyjon Khayrullaeva The first thing one notices in Oyjon Khayrullaeva’s work is its color. A saturated azure unites plants, birds, fish, female figures, and fragments of architectural ornament into a single visual field. At first, it appears to be simply an aesthetic choice—a chromatic register that binds the series together. Yet the longer one spends with these works, the more evident it becomes that azure functions as something other than the color of water or sky. It becomes a language of relationships. It does not depict nature; it reveals its internal organization. Leaving the artist’s studio, I found myself thinking neither about composition nor even about color. I was thinking about homeostasis. As a former researcher in the Research & Development department of the pharmaceutical industry, I have always regarded homeostasis as one of nature’s most astonishing phenomena. It is the ability of a living organism to maintain internal equilibrium through continuous change. Life persists not despite chaos, but because of it. During our conversation, Oyjon repeatedly used the expression «natural chaos,» and it was at that moment that I felt I had found the conceptual key to her artistic practice. We are accustomed to associating order with control. Cities are built according to geometric principles; knowledge is classified; space is divided into categories; architecture strives for symmetry. Modern society often equates order with the absence of randomness. Nature, however, operates differently. It knows no straight lines, yet it possesses equilibrium. It does not seek stillness; rather, it sustains stability through constant transformation. This is precisely why Oyjon’s compositions resist a single visual center. No element assumes dominance. Birds, fish, plants, female figures, architectural fragments, and ornamental motifs exist as an interconnected network in which meaning emerges not from isolated images but from the relationships between them. What initially appears to be decorative abundance gradually reveals itself as the structure of a living system. In this respect, her work unexpectedly resonates with the research of Olga Kisseleva, whose practice has long explored the relationships between humans, plants, and technology, treating nature as a complex intellectual system. Yet where Kisseleva approaches these questions through scientific research, biology, and technological inquiry, Oyjon arrives at similar concerns through an entirely different path: family history, cultural memory, architecture, and female lineage. In her work, nature and culture are never presented as opposites. Instead, they exist as mutually constitutive forces, continuously shaping one another.
You See the Color Azure. I See Homeostasis.
At first glance, **Eboro**, the exhibition by Ivorian artist **Nuits Balnéaires**, seems to tell a deeply personal story. It begins with the mysterious disappearance of the artist's uncle, the journalist and playwright Noël X. Ebony, who vanished in Dakar in 1986. Yet this is not an investigation or an attempt to reconstruct the past. Instead, the exhibition asks a quieter but more universal question: **What remains of a person after they disappear, and how does their life continue to shape future generations?** Drawing on the Agni-Bona tradition of Côte d'Ivoire, where a nephew accompanies his uncle into the world of the ancestors, Nuits Balnéaires transforms a family bond into an artistic method. Photography, performance, fashion, literature and research come together to create a meditation on kinship, grief and invisible inheritance. What moved me most was that the artist never separates personal memory from collective history. As he spoke about his uncle and the inexplicable connection he still feels with him, I realised I was hearing much more than the story of one Ivorian family. I was hearing the story of Uzbekistan. I thought about generations whose voices were interrupted not only by personal tragedy but also by political history. I thought about languages that were silenced, traditions pushed into private life, and memories that survived anyway—in family conversations, recipes, embroidery, gestures of hospitality and proverbs. What Nuits Balnéaires calls the transgenerational memory of one family resonated with me as the experience of an entire culture struggling to remember itself. This is where *Eboro* becomes something far greater than biography. It explores how the past continues to breathe inside the present. Rather than trying to explain everything, the artist accepts uncertainty. Imagination is not used to replace facts but to approach what facts alone cannot heal. He does not speak for the disappeared. Instead, he creates a space where absence itself becomes a form of presence. His work joins a broader tradition of contemporary artists who explore memory as something living rather than fixed. Christian Boltanski transformed photographs and archives into fragile traces of vanished lives. Doris Salcedo used everyday objects to reveal the invisible weight of political violence. Shirin Neshat explored exile, language and identity. Saodat Ismailova turned to oral histories, dreams and the cultural memory of Central Asia. Their practices are different, yet they share one conviction: **history never truly ends. It continues to live in bodies, families, languages and ways of seeing the world.** As an artist from Uzbekistan, and as a mother, this exhibition felt deeply personal. Since the birth of my son, I have found myself thinking less about what I will consciously teach him and more about everything I am already passing on without realising it. We inherit much more than language or traditions. We inherit pauses in conversation. Ways of responding to fear. Family silences. Habits of care. Feelings of shame. Hope. Resilience. A child may never know the story of a great-grandmother, yet still carry her caution. They may never hear a forbidden word, yet instinctively feel the tension surrounding language. They may never see a lost homeland, yet recognise it in an ornament, a recipe or a gesture repeated around the family table. That is why I see cultural transmission not as preserving the past unchanged, but as a living process. Memory evolves. It transforms. Yet it does not disappear. Leaving the exhibition, I realised that Nuits Balnéaires is not documenting history. He is showing how history continues to shape the present and how personal loss can become a path toward collective memory. **You see a family story.** **I see inherited memory.** And I left with one question that stayed with me long after the exhibition ended: **Which parts of my life truly belong to me—and which have been travelling through my family and my culture for generations, waiting for the moment when I would finally recognise them?**
you see fashion photography, I see open question
when you hear a sincere compliment from a foreigner...
Healthy sugar ofthe day
Today, on the 14th of July, I want to celebrate the country I chose almost half a lifetime ago. France became more than the place where I live. It became the place where I grew into adulthood, where I found my artistic voice, and where I learned to see challenges not only as obstacles, but as opportunities. To me, France is like an old, wise woman. She knows the value of things because she knows their cost. She understands that freedom, culture, beauty, and solidarity are never given for free—they are built patiently, protected carefully, and passed from one generation to the next. As someone who arrived from another culture, I discovered here that identity is not something we leave behind—it is something we continue to build. France gave me the freedom to create, to question, to dream, and to transform my experiences into art. Every year, this day reminds me how grateful I am for the path that brought me here. My roots remain where I was born, but my branches have grown here. Between those two worlds, I have found my own language. Thank you, France, for shaping the artist I have become, for teaching me to look further, and for reminding me that openness, curiosity, and creation are among the greatest forms of freedom. Happy Bastille Day.
14 juillet 2026
You see a chair. I see presence. At first glance, Susan Meiselas's Self-Portrait (1971) seems almost empty. A modest room. A wooden chair. A small table. A plant with drooping leaves. Only after a few seconds does another presence emerge. Sitting on the chair is the almost transparent silhouette of the artist herself, suspended somewhere between appearance and disappearance. The longer I looked, the less I saw furniture and the more I saw a question. You see a chair. I see presence. When Susan Meiselas created this photograph, she was still a student at Harvard. Using a long exposure, she allowed her body to dissolve into light. Later she explained that she wanted to place herself in the image because she lived in that room and therefore belonged there, yet at the same time she felt invisible. That tension—between existing and refusing to occupy the centre of attention—became one of the foundations of her entire practice. She is present, but she does not impose herself. She appears without claiming ownership of the image. Reading the exhibition catalogue at the Jeu de Paume, I realised that this early self-portrait already contains the ethics of everything Meiselas would later create. Whether documenting carnival performers, the revolutions in Nicaragua and El Salvador, Kurdish communities rebuilding their collective memory after genocide, or women affected by violence, she repeatedly questioned the traditional role of the photographer. Rather than collecting images, she built relationships. She returned years later to the same people, invited them to participate in constructing their own histories, and transformed photography from an act of observation into an act of listening. For Meiselas, a photograph is never simply evidence; it is a space where another person's voice can continue to exist. As a mother, this image speaks to me differently than it would have only a few years ago. Since my son was born, I have begun to understand that the deepest forms of presence are often the least visible. A child does not always remember what we say, but he remembers that we were there. Perhaps art functions in the same way. The strongest artists are not necessarily those who occupy the most space, but those who create enough space for someone else to exist. Looking at this photograph, I no longer see an empty chair or a disappearing figure. I see humility. I see attention. I see an artist who understood that photography is not about possessing another person's image but about acknowledging another person's presence. Perhaps this is why Susan Meiselas remains so important today. In both Eastern and Western artistic traditions, the greatest works often emerge not from the desire to dominate the world, but from the willingness to stand beside it. You see a chair. I see presence. And perhaps the people who shape our lives most profoundly are like this photograph—never demanding to be seen, yet quietly changing everything by simply being there.
You see chair , I see presence
You see photographs. I see a collection of ways of seeing. When people hear that Sir Elton John owns more than 7,000 photographs, they often imagine a collection built around fame, beauty, or prestige. But walking through Fragile at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, I realized something else. This isn't a collection of photographs. It's a collection of human experiences. The exhibition moves through five themes—desire, fashion, celebrity, identity, and photojournalism—but beneath them all lies the same question: What does it mean to be human? Strength. Fragility. Love. Loss. Memory. Desire. These are not separate stories. They are different ways of looking at the same life. What fascinated me most wasn't simply the quality of the photographs. It was the way Elton John and David Furnish collected them. For more than thirty years, they didn't collect images because they belonged to famous photographers. They collected images because they spoke to them. Because they recognized something. A feeling. A question. A vulnerability. As artists, we often talk about creating work. But perhaps collecting is another form of creation. Every collection becomes a self-portrait. The photographs you choose reveal what you cannot stop looking at. That is why this exhibition feels so personal. Through Robert Mapplethorpe, Diane Arbus, Irving Penn, Nan Goldin, Ai Weiwei, Harley Weir, Herbert List and many others, you are also looking at Elton John's way of seeing the world. And it made me wonder: If someone collected my work one day, what would they be collecting? Flowers? Uzbek patterns? Children? Family rituals? No. I hope they would be collecting questions. Questions about memory. About transmission. About motherhood. About the fragile ways cultures survive through language, gestures, recipes, ornaments, and stories. Since becoming a mother, I think differently about images. Every photograph becomes more than a picture. It becomes a possible inheritance. One day my son will build his own collection. Not necessarily of photographs. But of memories. Gestures. Words. Objects. People. Perhaps that is what every collection really is. Not an archive of things. An archive of what shaped us. Sir Elton John once said that photography, like songwriting, contains an element of chance—you simply have to recognize the right moment and press the shutter. I think motherhood is similar. Art is similar. Life is similar. The moments that shape us often arrive unexpectedly. The real question is whether we recognize them. You see photographs. I see a collection of ways of seeing the world.
You see photographs. I see a collection of ways of seeing. #jeudepaume #eltonjohn #Iseeyousee
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Daido Moriyama “Lettres d’amour à la photographie” You see photos, I see a Living Being leanring to Disappear

You see the white cube, I see the hospital walls

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