The First Bukhara Biennial Reveals That the Most Expensive Ingredient Is Time
Uzbekistan, a central region in the Silk Road and Soviet Union, has long connected “East and West” through major cities like Samarkand, Bukhara and its present-day capital, Tashkent. The contemporary recognition of these cultural centers has typically involved Western and European institutions, and especially UNESCO, in the designation of the Zarafshan-Karakum Corridor, alongside several sites and artisans located along the historic trading route, and crafts of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
The inaugural Bukhara Biennial claims to speak from the region—and reimagine the possibilities of such an event—on its own terms. It is one of Central Asia’s largest contemporary cultural initiatives to date, joining Tashkent’s Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) and National Museum of Uzbekistan (due to open in 2027) and, in neighboring Kazakhstan, the new Almaty Museum of Arts and relocated Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture.
To do so, it uses a reliable recipe. One hundred sixty visual and performance artists, artisans, architects and chefs from 39 countries are gathered together by the Biennial’s artistic director Diana Campbell. The Los Angeles-born curator calls upon a number of friends—Himali Singh Soin, from her work on Frieze Projects for Frieze London (2018-2019), and Antony Gormley, from her own Samdani Art Foundation and flagship Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) in Bangladesh—to present expressions of heartbreak, here a universal and almost apolitical emotion.
Crucially, though, all of the artists have collaborated with artisans based in Uzbekistan. Half of the participants are from Central Asia, though more often exhibit elsewhere, highlighting the importance of the institution for both locally-based and diasporic practitioners. Tashkent-based multimedia artist Denis Davydov, in collaboration with Bahrom Gulov and Anvar Gulov, also from Uzbekistan, highlights constructed notions of cultural authenticity with handcrafted whistles and toys, animated through computer-generated imagery (CGI). The installation is presented across worn carpets, pandjara (lattice)-clad screens and analog television sets, and retold to the familiar tune of Disney’s Aladdin (1992). The writhing figures in Aziza Shadenova and Andrey Arakelyan’s Echo of the Self: The Soul in Motion, the Body Forgotten (2024-2025) advance the histories of orientalism as held and reproduced in human bodies today, similarly presented on a series of screens.
Others take “traditional” and tourist crafts as their starting point, advancing Bukhara’s long practice of puppet theater and performance. (Perhaps surprisingly, Wael Shawky, well-known for his collaborative work in this field, leans into the city’s copper-making instead.) Over the opening weekend, Kamruzzaman Shadhin and Zavkiddin Yodgorov presented Safar (Journey) (2025), a procession of exaggerated symbolic animals said to have once traveled Sufi thinkers across Central and South Asia. Puppetry was strongly protected by locals through the arrival of Islam in the region; in Bukhara, the practice is held up by members of the Uzbekistan National Guard.
In a state characterized by its tightly controlled government, media and lack of genuine political competition, this is as—and how—political the Biennial gets. The generic theme of ‘heartbreak’ is open to interpretation, and also conceptual stretching, but has resulted in most cases in quite restrained works; despite the opportunity presented by the Biennial, which mandates that all work be new and produced on site. But scale and subtle language employed in the works’ titles can be read in many ways. In Standing by the Ruins IV (2025), Dana Awartani invites us to walk amongst large ceramic tiles pressed with soils from Palestine. The medium is absent in the official description. By contrast, the interpretation in Awartani’s concurrent exhibition at the Arnolfini in Bristol points out the Palestinian-Saudi artist’s first inspiration: the washroom tiles of the fourteenth-century Hamam al-Sammara in Gaza, one of the region’s oldest bathhouses, which was destroyed by Israeli bombardment in 2023.
Awartani’s work, explicitly part of a wider series, is in many respects an exception. All of the works in the Biennial are new commissions, made in collaboration with artisans in the country and produced by the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF). While some motifs—such as the pomegranate—are shared across cultures, the strongest works have been forged through difficulty, highlighting the realities and creative potential of intercultural collaboration. These include the ceramic organs Black Bile (2024-2025), produced by Pakui Hardware, the collaborative duo of Ugnius Gelguda and Neringa Černiauskaitė and the Rakhimovs’ Ceramic Studio in Tashkent.
Both the Biennial and ACDF have a strong emphasis on public engagement and programming, but first cater to “international” audiences—evident in the predominance of the English language during the opening weekend. Certainly, the Biennial begins at a time of increased interest and representation of Central Asian cultural influences, including the first solo exhibitions of Biennial artists Slavs and Tatars and Wael Shawky at esea Contemporary in Manchester and Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh, respectively.
Though staffed from the States, the Biennial’s wider education program, supported by the King’s Foundation in London, is one of many connections to the U.K. The Delfina Foundation has supported a number of contemporary artist residencies in London, including Biennial artist Gulnoza Irgasheva, as well as Nazira Karimi and Intizor Otaniyozova (2025), two members of the Davra Research Collective initiated by alum Saodat Ismailova. With the close of the Biennial in November comes the opening of Ismailova’s solo exhibition at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, their largest presentation in the U.K. to date.
Though the temporary, transitory nature of these exhibitions might work well for their nomadic subject matters, deeper research into Uzbekistan’s presence in permanent collections is also underway. Bukhara’s central role in textile production was referenced in the British Museum’s fine display, “War rugs: Afghanistan’s knotted history,” while ikat textiles, or abr as they are called in Uzbek, derived from the Persian language word for “cloud,” have been shown in cross-cultural exhibitions like “Cold War Scotland” at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
Like Davydov, London-based artist Aziza Kadyri employs new technologies to refigure cultural heritage; in Bukhara, Cut from the Same Cloth (2024-2025) weaves through and out of one of the central madrasas, reflecting the central placement of artists of Uzbek heritage. Kadyri co-represented Uzbekistan at the Venice Biennale in 2024 with a similarly immersive textile installation; now, she is developing research into the collections of the V&A in London.
The Biennial raises questions about the museumification of Bukhara itself. Millions of dollars (or quadrillions of sum) have been poured into the conservation and restoration of the city in advance of the cultural event. Visitors return to sites that have been repurposed time and again, now marked “under state protection.” The Magoki Attori Mosque, which hosted the Opening Ceremony and Biennial “Archive,” has served as a (Persian) Zoroastrian temple, a mosque and a synagogue on Fridays before its transformation into a carpet museum during the communist period (1924-1991). This is embraced in the temporary nature of the Biennial and many of the public works, which change with the weather.
ACDF has invested in places intended for regular use by the local population, including a new library in Tashkent and pop-up in Bukhara, and, promisingly, the forthcoming Jadids’ Legacy Museum (2027). Led by architect Lina Ghotmeh, the project intends to transform one scholar’s home into an open space to explore the continuities of the titular 19th- and 20th-century movement of cultural, social and educational reform.
Many themes are raised but underdeveloped; food, for instance, could be the guiding principle for an entire edition. In Café Oshqozon, diners can taste Brutalist Bukhara, a menu developed by Uzbek chefs Bahriddin Chustiy and Pavel Georganov and Coen Dieleman and Carsten Höllen from Brutalisten in Sweden. It challenges the homogenization of tastes by pluralizing ingredients like carrot, tomato and quince, each served five ways on a single plate. The cost of this offering is unclear, again raising the question of who the Biennial is truly for. Questions of seasonality are suggested but not related to wider questions of ecological grief, the relations between salt and water, nor the use of fruit- and vegetable-derived pigments, inks, dyes and spices in works by Delcy Morelos, Samah Hijawi and Feruza Asatova.
Another example in this first iteration is the local relation to Ibn Sina (or Avicenna), a significant thinker, physician and leader in modern medicine in the 10th Century. The myth that Ibn Sina invented plov (the national dish of Uzbekistan) as the recipe to cure the broken heart of a prince who could not marry the daughter of a craftsman was an inspiration for Campbell in this edition. “Everything I needed was in that sentence,” she remarked in a ‘symposium’ that preceded the Biennial, which shares its didactic structure with the talks of the public program thus far, in which people can freely listen but not ask questions or raise points themselves. More participatory events to come over the next two months will tell of the local public engagement—and appetite—for such events, particularly amongst young people, who comprise the majority of Uzbekistan’s population today.
The Bukhara Biennial has some great ingredients. But like all good recipes, it should be taken as a starting point, not a prescription, for better cultural servings.
The Bukhara Biennial, “Recipes for Broken Hearts,” runs through November 20, 2025.
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