BUKHARA, Uzbekistan — On the floor, the inaugural Bukhara Biennial is a stunner. The occasion manages, in flashes, to make one imagine within the promise of tradition as connective tissue and to neglect the ulterior motive of the occasion. The title, Recipes for Damaged Hearts, is apt. Bukhara is a metropolis that has had its coronary heart damaged many occasions: by Mongols, by the Russian Empire, by the Soviets, and now by builders and autocratic rule. Regardless of all of this, there may be nonetheless actual transcendent magnificence within the metropolis, which the biennial highlights and even amplifies.
Beneath the creative course of Diana Campbell with Gayane Umerova, the biennial has remodeled unused caravanserais, madrasas, and one mosque right into a maze of miniature galleries. The construction of the previous metropolis’s structure — with honeycombs of small rooms clustered round courtyards — makes it an distinctive match for modern artwork. It’s a marvel that nobody has used these areas for artwork installations earlier than.
The entire 70-plus artworks have been by Uzbek artists, who sometimes collaborated with a international artist. This allowed the exhibition to keep away from a standard biennial pitfall through which international artists are merely ornamental additions, parachuted in. The result’s a present that didn’t really feel like a mimicry of drained biennial aesthetics. Importantly, all the Uzbek contributors are given equal billing.
One instance is the stunning piece “Longing” (2025), which runs by means of the location, by the Indian and British duo Hylozoic/Wishes in collaboration with Uzbek artist Rasuljon Mirzaahmedov. Bands of regionally made ikat textiles measuring round 1.24 miles (two kilometers) are woven by means of the town’s underground water passages, popping up throughout the exhibition in stunning locations, stitching the house collectively. The work asks us to mirror on collective trauma and the continuity of social habits, seen and unseen.
One other spectacular work that spans a number of areas is “Eight Lives” (2024–25) by Oyjon Khayrullaeva in collaboration with Raxmon Toirov and Rauf Taxiro, all Uzbek artists. Its three items use Uzbekistan’s conventional blue ceramics to reference intergenerational feminine networks of care in Bukharian tradition. They characteristic an outsized liver, lung, and coronary heart with medical herbs chosen by Khayrullaeva’s grandmother and a Bukharian herbalist.
At an October 6 panel hosted by the biennial, College of Pittsburgh Professor James Pickett identified that the artists whose work occupies rooms within the previous city convey us nearer to recreating Bukhara’s genuine historic texture than any “restoration” that preceded it. The Soviets imposed an antiseptic imaginative and prescient beginning within the Twenties, stripping away centuries of overlapping layers within the historic areas of the town to create memorialized buildings that mirrored their imagined ultimate of the unique constructions. The biennial remodeled the buildings again into areas with a number of meanings and eras represented.
Earlier than Russian colonization started within the nineteenth century, the town was an mental capital of the Islamic world, house to mathematicians, astronomers, and poets. The biennial’s greatest works perceive this inheritance.
Palestinian-Saudi artist Dana Awartani, as an illustration, presents “Standing by the Ruins IV” 2025 in partnership with Uzbek artist Behzod Turdiyev as a press release of remembrance and continuance. In keeping with the wall textual content, the title attracts upon “wuqūf ‘alā al—at.lāl,” a pre-Islamic poetic type that usually explores themes of affection, destruction, and the passage of time. Utilizing clay sourced from Palestine, the piece reconstructs the misplaced geometric motifs of Gaza’s historic 14th-century Hammam al-Sammara, or Samra Bathtub, destroyed in 2023 by Israeli bombs.
Additionally essential to the success of the biennial was the native viewers. On the times I visited, the courtyards have been filled with Uzbeks: girls with gold enamel, youngsters in knockoff Balenciaga, males in sq. Uzbek skullcaps, school youngsters, flaneurs. Locals who appeared to be having fun with the artwork. Importantly for the nation whose common per capita earnings is simply north of $3,000 a 12 months, the exhibition is free.
A volunteer information, who requested to not be named as speaking freely in an authoritarian nation at all times carries dangers, informed me, “Uzbek individuals are pleased with this occasion. That is the primary biennial like this in Central Asia. They just like the Uzbek-language the most effective however are additionally very completely happy to see the insides of those buildings, which have been closed for a very long time earlier than.”
Nonetheless, there are limitations to having fun with the biennial. My arrival within the capital metropolis of Tashkent started with a shakedown. I ended up paying $200 to get into the nation. After a long time of dwelling in Asia, Europe, and West Africa, this was my first bribe. Later, a lodge clerk launched right into a George Wallace-inspired lecture about how “America wants segregation once more.” Incel paranoia and racism have a transnational uniformity.
Uzbekistan, for all its superlative security and attraction, generally feels unnerving. In Samarkand’s markets, I noticed gray wolf pores and skin and enamel sellers — representing the big and violent Turkic fascist group — beside fridge magnet and scarf distributors. In my quick keep, I noticed two fights get away on the road between bridal events.
The elegant biennial guidebooks and maps have been on show however not on the market. Guests have been informed by biennial workers not to have a look at them too lengthy, lest they injury them. Uzbekistan will not be prepared for artwork tourism but.
Maybe most troubling is the query of why this occasion is occurring in any respect. Artwashing, the observe of utilizing artwork to cowl up structural abuses, just isn’t new. From Azerbaijan’s YARAT Middle to Saudi Arabia’s Desert X AlUla, regimes have realized that artwork is efficient propaganda. It rebrands nations, softens photos, and seduces journalists. The Bukhara Biennial, for all its sincerity and incredible work, is part of this technique.
Artwashing has an extended historical past on this area. Timur (Tamerlane), the 14th-century conqueror of Samarkand, was a progenitor of the method. Timur kidnapped and forcibly relocated artisans from throughout his empire to assemble a metropolis of exceptional magnificence. Immediately, he’s much less recognized for widespread slaughter than for his architectural and creative achievements.
The logic is analogous right this moment: Energy is legitimized and laundered by means of artwork. Recipes for Damaged Hearts is stuffed with real brilliance — artists grappling with heritage, id, and trauma in spectacular settings. But the biennial is supported by the state-funded Uzbekistan Artwork and Tradition Growth Basis. Its very existence will depend on a restrictive autocratic construction. Because the dying of Uzbekistan’s first post-Soviet strongman Islam Karimov, who normalized human rights atrocities, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has pursued modernization. Nonetheless, Amnesty Worldwide continues to report widespread censorship, violation of LGBTQ+ rights, and harassment of journalists. In 2022, protests within the autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan have been violently suppressed, leaving round two dozen lifeless and over 270 injured. But these are not often mentioned in the identical breath as Uzbekistan’s new cultural tasks, together with amongst artwork publications.
The Bukhara Biennial appears to sign an openness according to Mirziyoyev’s marketing campaign to make the town a centerpiece of tourism. Towards this backdrop, UNESCO has expressed concern about huge authorities growth probably destroying the character of the previous metropolis. Alerte Héritage, a non-governmental group devoted to the safety of Central Asia’s architectural cultural heritage, has known as the federal government’s plan to rework Bukhara “catastrophic in each respect.” The Bukhara Biennial didn’t reply Hyperallergic’s questions concerning the authorities’s involvement within the exhibition.
One can see this sort of growth in different places. Whereas making an attempt to trace down the Museum of Folks’s Friendship and Non secular Tolerance in Samarkand, I discovered the constructing had been become a quick meals restaurant that marketed a dish known as jiz-biz in daring letters on an indication spanning the previous museum’s Corinthian columns. Growth is rampant and flattening in Uzbekistan.
Regardless of the artwashing, the biennial issues. It doesn’t have the sanitized, apolitical really feel of a dictator’s vainness present. Even because the state tries to make use of artwork to shine its picture, the artists produced work that’s essential, legitimate, and validating. The artwork was typically good and sometimes nice: There have been edges to among the work that didn’t at all times really feel secure.
“Beneath the Mulberry Tree, the Wind Sang Our Names” (2024–25), spanning three rooms inside the previous Rashid Madrasa, was one such work. The piece by Hera Büyüktasciyan, a Turkish artist of Armenian ethnicity, and Uzbek artist Isiom Khudoyberdiev options distorted black kinds with half-finished musical devices carved from mulberry wooden. The otherworldly soundscape thuds, wails, and clangs. Büyüktasciyan wrote within the wall textual content, “Coming to this land of mulberry bushes resonated with cycles of sacrifice, skin-changing and coexistence. Reminiscing of my nice grandmother, a silkworm farmer from Bardizag, I needed to have a look at the mulberry tree as a vessel by means of musical devices carved by means of its physique.” The artist makes use of the Indigenous Armenian identify for the city of Bardizag, now renamed Bahgecik by the Turkish authorities. As a Turkish citizen, Büyüktasciyan is making work concerning the Armenian Genocide, which continues to be denied and forbidden in public discourse in her nation.
The Bukhara Biennial is an phantasm, an oasis in a desert of repression. There are moments when it’s a stunning, affecting, and great mirage. It will likely be attention-grabbing to see if the brand new Centre for Modern Arts, opening within the extra industrial and fewer poetic capital metropolis of Tashkent below the course of Sara Raza (recognized for anodyne curation in addition to a monitor document of catering to dictators), will seize the identical daring magic.
Recipes for Damaged Hearts continues at varied websites throughout Bukhara, Uzbekistan, by means of November 20. The exhibition was curated by Diana Campbell.
