bradley leonard
Waiting for Aziza (2025)
Hosted by Va[a]ds in Tbilisi, Georgia
Waiting for Aziza explores the conditions of inquiry and expression under authoritarian systems, drawing parallels between artistic and scientific experimentation. The work connects two seemingly distant sites: the Soviet-era ROT-54 radio-optical research station near Yerevan, and the musical world of Azerbaijani composer and pianist Vaqif Mustafazadeh, creator of the jazz-mugham genre.
At its core, the work brings together visual material appropriated from the interior of a piano found in the ROT-54 community room and transcriptions from Mustafazadeh’s 1979 performance of Waiting on Aziza. The piano’s interior serves as a condensed record of contradiction. Produced for Soviet research institutions, its emblem links it to state-sponsored scientific inquiry, yet its placement in the community room gestures toward the performance of cultural life within state structures, the very same culture that it stifled.
Jazz-mugham incorporated modal and rhythmic systems from the mugham tradition that stood apart from Western or Soviet musical frameworks. Its improvisatory structures and poetic forms, such as meykhana, resisted codification and control; many of its nuances remain impossible to fully transcribe within Western notation. Despite occasional state recognition, Mustafazadeh’s work existed in tension with the ideological boundaries of the time.
By situating the improvised and the decayed side by side, Waiting for Aziza reflects on how systems of power constrain, yet inadvertently generate, new forms of inquiry and expression.
The work was accompanied by an edition of twenty-five T-Shirts, produced in collaboration with JPG Printshop in Tbilisi.
Documentation: Ilinca Fechete