Zibeyda
Seyidova

Zibeyda Seyidova's artistic practice is centred on perception as a living and continuous process in which the present cannot be separated from memory, vision from embodied experience, or the external world from a person's inner state. She is concerned not so much with what a person sees as with the way in which the visible emerges within consciousness and acquires meaning.

The philosophical foundation of her practice lies in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception. Within this tradition, the individual is not understood as a detached observer standing before an objective reality that is fully accessible to them. Rather, the individual is always already situated within the world — bodily, emotionally and historically. Perception is never neutral: every act of looking carries within it prior experience, memory, expectation and unconscious modes of feeling.

From this perspective, Seyidova regards the visible not as a complete image of the world, but as its partial manifestation. The surface of reality is not false, yet it never exhausts all that it contains. Beyond immediately perceptible form lies a depth of connections, sensations and memories that cannot be fully represented or named, but which continue to participate in the act of seeing.

In her work, memory is understood not as an archive preserving precise evidence of the past, but as an active medium through which the present is formed. Human experience never begins from a blank slate: every new encounter enters into relation with what has already been lived, lost, transmitted or forgotten. The past does not remain behind us; it continues to operate within the present, altering its contours.

For Seyidova, memory is at once personal and broader than any single biography. Alongside individual recollection, human beings carry inherited modes of feeling, cultural images, gestures, fears and forms of recognition whose origins may remain unconscious. In this sense, memory becomes one of the building materials of civilisation. Culture exists through the continuous transmission and transformation of experience, but also through rupture, loss and forgetting. Humanity shapes itself not only through what it preserves, but also through what it represses, rewrites or can no longer recover.

A central place in Seyidova's practice is occupied by the moment of recognition without a clear source — a state in which an image, rhythm, space or colour feels familiar before the viewer is able to explain why. This recognition emerges at the threshold between personal experience and a deeper cultural memory. It suggests that perception begins before conscious thought and does not always submit to language.

For this reason, abstraction in Seyidova's work is not a rejection of reality. On the contrary, it offers a means of approaching those dimensions of reality that cannot be conveyed through literal representation. She works with states that arise before a stable image or verbal definition: tension, pause, anticipation, absence, proximity and inner impulse. Abstract form keeps these states open, without reducing them to a single narrative or symbol.

Her works do not illustrate specific memories. Instead, they create the conditions in which memory begins to act of its own accord. The viewer may encounter a sense of closeness to something they cannot fully recover, or an impression of recognition without any obvious explanation. Within this process, meaning is not contained in the work as a predetermined message. It emerges through the encounter between the artwork and the embodied, emotional and historical experience of the viewer.

The dark spaces in Seyidova's work do not carry a fixed symbolic meaning. They become zones of partial indeterminacy, in which vision loses its familiar points of reference and begins to draw upon memory, expectation and inner experience. Light does not reveal a final truth; it merely renders individual fragments of a more complex reality temporarily perceptible.

This approach allows Seyidova to engage with painting not as an image of the world, but as an event of perception. The work exists not only as a material object, but also as a field of relations between the visible and the implicit, the present and an inherited past, form and that which has not yet taken form.

At the heart of her practice is the conviction that reality is never fully disclosed to the individual. It is formed through the interaction between the world and perceiving consciousness, between what is present before the gaze and what that gaze already carries within it. In this context, art neither explains reality nor offers a definitive interpretation. It makes its complexity perceptible and creates a space in which the viewer may become aware of the very act of their own perception.