Play Nice is an immersive, interactive installation expanding Kadyri’s ongoing worldbuilding series. It traces the origins of her alter ego – a trickster figure drawn from Central Asian and Middle Eastern oral traditions and rooted in her Uzbek identity. This unseen, shifting presence reflects cultural survival and the reimagining of heritage in digital and diasporic contexts.

One of the scenographic states in the show is activated when a visitor sits on a wooden school chair. As they take a seat, strip lights switch on, revealing painted walls reminiscent of post-Soviet institutional interiors and a row of classroom-style portraits. These portraits reference the authoritative, white, male figures that once lined school walls in Kadyri’s memories, but here they appear transformed. Using a series of AI models that Kadyri has fine-tuned and customised - including generators she built specifically for this work - she digitally alters the faces to resemble herself.

Through this process, Kadyri reconfigures a familiar line-up of power into a new pantheon shaped by her own experience as a Central Asian immigrant, while also speaking to wider immigrant narratives and the stereotypes and archetypes so often projected onto them.

Here you can see some of the unused images that were part of the development process.