WHEN THE BUKHARA BIENNIAL was first announced in 2024, the seventh-largest city in Uzbekistan did not strike me as an obvious site for a blockbuster exhibition of international contemporary art. Settled over two thousand years ago, Bukhara was once a vital crossroads on the Silk Road and a renowned center of scholarship during the medieval Islamic Golden Age, home to polymaths like the eleventh-century philosopher and physician Ibn Sina (better known in the West as Avicenna), whose encyclopedic Canon of Medicine, completed in 1025, remained the standard medical reference text well into the sixteenth century. But this cultural heyday is in the distant past: Today, the city has very little in the way of an institutional ecosystem of contemporary art museums, galleries, and art schools, nor a vibrant underground history to invoke. (It’s also not particularly easy to reach from major art-world centers. Only six international cities have direct flights to Bukhara, and five of those are in Russia.) As recently as 2021, Uzbekistan’s president, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, castigated local officials for the city’s failure to meet various socioeconomic benchmarks, noting rampant corruption and bribery, high levels of unemployment, and inadequate urban infrastructure.
What the biennial does have plenty of is political backing. Since becoming president in 2016 after a thirteen-year stint as prime minister, Mirziyoyev has made boosting tourism, especially in stagnant regional centers like Bukhara, a key part of his political platform, with crafts and cultural heritage positioned as a kind of insufficiently exploited national resource. Accordingly, the biennial, curated by Dhaka Art Summit artistic director Diana Campbell, was conceived less as an exhibition bringing the work of international contemporary artists to Uzbekistan than as an invitation to international contemporary artists to interpret the country’s craft traditions. Titled “Recipes for Broken Hearts” in a nod to Ibn Sina—who according to legend created Uzbekistan’s national dish, palov, as a balm for the broken heart of a lovelorn prince—the show comprises seventy new commissions concentrated in four recently renovated sites in the city’s historical core, newly pedestrianized for the occasion, for which the invited artists were paired with local collaborators, including master artisans, merchants, dancers, and musicians.
The Bukhara Biennial belongs to a broader program of big-ticket initiatives produced under the aegis of Uzbekistan’s Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF), a government organization formed by Mirziyo-yev in 2017 and spearheaded by Gayane Umerova, a glamorous UK-educated former curator at the Art Gallery of Uzbekistan in Tashkent and close associate of the president’s daughter Saida Mirziyoyeva, who also happens to hold the number two spot in her father’s administration. While much of the ACDF’s activity to date has involved promoting Uzbekistan’s art and culture abroad—an exhibition that opened at the Louvre in Paris in late 2022, “The Splendors of Uzbekistan’s Oases,” was a particular coup—the next phase of its work is focused on institution-building at home. The first week of Septem-ber was meant to be the triumphant kickoff, with back-to-back openings of the Centre for Contemporary Art Tashkent (CCA) and the Bukhara Biennial, for which a phalanx of international journalists, critics, curators, and miscellaneous VIPs were flown in. (That last category included the satiric luxury lifestyle influencer known as “Gstaad Guy.”) But at the last minute, the CCA’s opening date was pushed to March 2026; I learned of the delay right around the time I walked into the obviously unfinished building—a former tram depot originally built in 1912 and renovated by the Paris-based Studio KO—for a gala dinner now repackaged as a sneak preview of the CCA’s future home (a tour of the inaugural exhibition, “Hikmah,” curated by artistic director Sara Raza, having been quietly scrubbed from the itinerary). The biennial had a few hiccups of its own: When we arrived in Bukhara, a few hours before the show was slated to open to the public, an ACDF representative admitted that a power outage had put the final installation process behind schedule and the advance press walk-through with Campbell had been canceled.
By this point, on day three of the trip, I was starting to wonder if I’d see any art in Uzbekistan at all. Thankfully the answer was yes, and much of it was exquisite. In the narrow canal running through the old city, the London- and New Delhi–based duo Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser, fresh off a solo show at Tate Britain) and ninth-generation Uzbek weaver Rasuljon Mirzaahmedov suspended an ikat tapestry bearing a pattern based on satellite data charting the disappearance of the Aral Sea over the past century, inscribing the devastation of this ecological disaster into a craft form traditionally associated with the evocation of more charming natural phenomena. Another contribution by Tappeser, Mur-Mur, 2024–25, occupies adjacent rooms in the biennial’s largest site, a complex of four interconnected caravanserais originally constructed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as rest stops for traveling merchants. In one room, Tappeser placed a pile of hushtaks—traditional bird-shape clay whistles—made by the late ceramicist Kubaro Babaeva and her students, inviting visitors to take one into a makeshift recording booth next door to capture its song.
I could never shake the sense that this was less an exhibition than a showpiece for the Mirziyoyev regime, part of a vast rebranding exercise for a country about which Western audiences know either too little (“like Borat?”) or too much (corrupt autocracy with sham elections).
In the same complex is the first half of another work requesting sonic participation, by Lithuanian duo Pakui Hardware and the ceramicists Alisher and Shokhrukh Rakhimov. Black Bile, 2024–25, explores how humans have conceived of psychic ailments and their treatment, from Ibn Sina’s four humors to contemporary AI therapy: Dangling from metal armatures is a pair of kidney-like black ceramic forms outfitted with speakers playing music algorithmically generated from recordings of secrets that visitors whisper into a set of ceramic ears housed at another biennial site. The work overlooks a central courtyard that has been given over to a ceramic mosaic by Brazilian painter Marina Perez Simão and Bakhtiyar Babamuradov, whose swirling abstract forms are meant to evoke a celestial map. Nearby, the London-based Aziza Kadyri, who represented Uzbekistan at the last Venice Biennale, worked with embroiderer Yulduz Mukhiddinova to create an installation based on the deconstructed form of a cotton gin, using traditional Uzbek suzani embroidery to illustrate scenes from a diary her grandfather kept during a 1969 research trip to study cotton refining in the American South. (A small side room contains an interactive video animating the diary and the artist’s research around it.)
At the sixteenth-century Gavkushon Madrasa, the central courtyard—outfitted with modular woven furnishings produced by architect Suchi Reddy with weaver Malika Berdiyarova—hosts the biennial’s program of talks and workshops. I was particularly charmed by QOURDS & QURBAN, 2024–25, by Berlin-based collective Slavs and Tatars, known for their impish takes on artifacts of Eurasian cultural exchange. Inspired by an Uzbek legend that melons were a gift from God and the script-like cracks across their surface an indecipherable divine message, the work comprises an array of forty different varieties of melon suspended from a wooden lattice under an archway. They are accompanied by a display of ceramic plates and bowls by artisan Abdullo Narzullaev, whose calligraphic decoration is a reverse transliteration of the names of melon species from Uzbekistan’s Karakalpakstan region, from Cyrillic back into the Arabic script originally used to write the local language. I encountered some of the melons again in different form at the biennial’s restaurant, Café Osh-qozon, where they were turned into a “Brutalist Melon Moment” (also known as sorbet) as part of a menu based on Carsten Höller’s 2018 “Brutalist Kitchen Manifesto,” which dictates that each dish can use only one ingredient. Around the corner, Laila Gohar worked with architect Ilkhom Shoyimkulov to construct a crystalline pavilion out of navat, sticks of rock sugar traditionally made with grape syrup and served with tea.
At the site of the Khoja Kalon Mosque, built in 1598 but mostly in ruins today, artists address modes of preservation and repair. Croatian artist Hana Miletić worked with Bakhshillo Jumaev and Mukkadas Jumaeva to fill cracks in the facade with gold embroidery—a craft historically associated with Bukhara—inspired by anonymous DIY repairs she encountered across the city. In the courtyard, Bogotá-based Delcy Morelos erected a jute pyramid coated in a mix of cinnamon, cloves, turmeric, and clay blended by Baxtiyor Akhmedov, a fourth-generation Bukhara spice merchant, which opens up onto an installation by Antony Gormley and restorer Temur Jumaev consisting of thousands of handmade mud bricks arranged into funereal stacks. In the show’s final venue, the Rashid Madrasa, the Palestinian Saudi artist Dana Awartani likewise attempts to keep cultural memory alive by preserving its architectural traces in Standing by the Ruins IV, 2025, a group of freestanding tiled floor panels made with ceramicist Behzod Turdiyev that reconstruct segments of the patterned floors of Gaza’s Hamam al-Sammara, destroyed in an Israeli air strike in 2023, a theme she also took up in her installation for the 2024 Venice Biennale. This was among the few works on view to acknowledge present-day crises, albeit in abstract form; though one of the biennial’s central themes is art’s capacity to nourish and heal, it is conspicuously vague about what needs healing.
On the whole, the biennial’s works are beautifully crafted and sensitively embedded within the historical architecture of their sites—no small feat. The local audience also seemed genuinely engaged and enthusiastic, and I suspected that these spaces would remain similarly lively throughout the show’s run, long after the international guests who dropped in for the opening were gone. But despite this valiant effort by Campbell, the show’s curatorial team, and the participating artists, I could never shake the sense that this was less an exhibition than a showpiece for the Mirziyoyev regime, part of a vast rebranding exercise for a country about which Western audiences know either too little (“like Borat?”) or too much (corrupt autocracy with sham elections). In this light, the works on view are not just collaborations between two sets of makers combining their diverse expertise, but “collabs,” cross-promotional mash-ups of brand signatures: Laila Gohar x Uzbekistan.
Admittedly, Uzbekistan has made no secret of the fact that the biennial and other ACDF-sponsored initiatives are soft-power projects. “A Vision for Bukhara,” Umerova’s introduction to the biennial guidebook, identifies the revitalization of the city’s historical sites as part of Mirziyoyev’s plan for a “cultural renaissance” in Uzbekistan, “a long term national strategy that places culture, arts, and heritage at the core of the country’s development.” Part of that development concerns the need to direct the energies of the country’s youth, who make up some 60 percent of the population (as representatives of the ACDF never missed an opportunity to mention). Given Uzbekistan’s proximity to Afghanistan, the potential for radicalization remains a persistent concern. Surveying the crowds during the opening days, it was possible to envision how such an ambitious event might open new imaginative avenues for the country’s next generations, which could in turn be nurtured by the more permanent cultural institutions that ACDF is attempting to create more or less from scratch.
More cynically, the purpose of ACDF projects like the Bukhara Biennial is to make Uzbekistan more palatable to foreign investors. When he took over the presidency, Mirziyoyev set about dramatically reforming the isolationist economic policy of his predecessor, Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan’s first post-Soviet leader, opening the country up to significant foreign direct investment for the first time, loosening restrictions on currency exchange, and setting in motion the privatization of state-owned companies, which still dominate many of its most lucrative industries. “We are building a new Uzbekistan,” Mirziyoyev proclaimed in an address this past summer, “a country that is open, free, stable, and reliable for investors.”
Biennials, triennials, and other such flagship art events always have been enmeshed with the social, political, and economic aspirations of their hosts. Yet over the past decade or so, in parts of the world with enormous wealth and lackluster human rights records, a biennial and a museum by a Pritzker Prize–winning architect have come to be seen as virtually mandatory steps in demonstrating a willingness to play ball with the West. As Pablo Larios wrote in the May 2025 issue of Artforum after visiting the second Islamic Arts Biennial in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia—one of many such projects in the Gulf that have served as a model for Uzbekistan’s ACDF—“modern states have diversified economies and multipolar alliances; they have sustainable hotels, food, and tourism; they have mechanisms for government accountability, non-corruption, and digital access; and they also put on biennials.” What would seem to distinguish these projects in Bukhara, Jeddah, Doha, or Diriyah from their predecessors in Venice, Kassel, São Paulo, Sydney, Berlin, or Istanbul is an inversion of emphasis: not art exhibitions shaped by negotiations with their politicized contexts, but political agendas whose chosen vehicle happens to be an art exhibition. But perhaps this division is too simplistic: So many of the established biennials on the art-world circuit today seem to be crumbling under the weight of their own internal contradictions, freighted with the competing, and ultimately irreconcilable, demands of curators, artists, administrators, funding bodies, and local governments. At least in Bukhara, the aims are perfectly clear.
Rachel Wetzler is the executive editor of Artforum.
