The Venice Biennale and Central Asia’s Rise in the Global Art World
While Central Asia has historically been home to several notable cultural hubs, particularly during the Silk Road era, it’s only recently that its countries have attracted the attention of the international art world. Central Asia comprises a group of countries colloquially referred to as the “Stans”—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. All boast incredible cultural heritage and long histories, yet for decades, even after attaining independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union, these countries occupied an awkward position in the Western imagination: too Asian to fit neatly into narratives of post-Soviet Europe, too Soviet to be folded easily into broader stories of Asian contemporary art and too internally diverse and distinctly culturally rich to function as a single category. The entire region was reduced to a blind spot that nobody paid much attention to—the prevailing, and prejudiced, assumption being that not much was happening.
Yet, even during the Soviet period, Uzbekistan maintained a remarkably active and flourishing creative and cultural scene, despite remaining largely invisible to distant audiences. “While Europe and North America were not aware of what was happening in Central Asia, it doesn’t mean there was no activity,” former Guggenheim curator Sara Raza explained in a recent interview with Observer, following her appointment as director of the Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. “If anything, it was a great moment for the east. East activity, South-South activity—communication within the global south,” she added, pointing to a great deal of exchange and activity with Latin America and Asia during the Cold War, which translated into several festivals and cultural collaborations.
After the war in Iran delayed its opening set for late March, the newly renovated CCA in Tashkent will finally be unveiled on September 6, following a major expansion that aims to reposition it as a new arts and cultural hub for Uzbekistan and the broader region.
The recent rise of Central Asia in the international art system has been driven, in part, by a concentrated wave of institution-building, biennials, cultural diplomacy and private patronage, with Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan leading the charge. Last fall, art-world feeds were suddenly flooded with images from the inaugural Bukhara Biennial, which ran through November 20 in the historic Silk Road center of Bukhara, a UNESCO Creative City of Crafts and Folk Art, featuring more than 70 site-specific commissions by more than 200 artists from 39 countries.
Curated by Diana Campbell, the biennial was commissioned by curator Gayane Umerova, chair of the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation, a recently created government body advancing the country’s culture-led development strategy, which is also behind the CCA and other exhibitions around the world. According to Umerova, the Bukhara Biennale is part of a broader effort to activate, through art and culture, different cities and parts of the country’s heritage, rather than concentrate it only around the capital. “We’re trying to really spread,” she told Observer. “We don’t want to make Tashkent the only center. It’s important for us to show the legacy of all the cities along the Silk Road.”
A second edition of the Bukhara Biennial is planned for September 3 – November 21, 2027, with architect and designer Kulapat Yantrasast serving as artistic director. At the same time, Uzbekistan is developing a new State Museum of Arts, designed by Tadao Ando. The project is part of a broader effort to modernize the country’s museum infrastructure and connect archaeological, historical, modern and contemporary narratives. Set to open in Tashkent in March 2028, the spectacular 40,038-square-meter building will reflect Ando’s architectural language while integrating references to Uzbekistan’s heritage through geometric structures, natural light and spatial clarity. A major museum in Samarkand connected to the Silk Road is also set to open around the same time.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Uzbekistan’s cultural scene had weakened, public demand for contemporary culture was limited and the government had other priorities. Things started to change only recently, Umerova said. When the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF), the foundation aimed at preserving and promoting Uzbekistan’s heritage, arts and culture, received the building and the project began in 2018, relatively few young people seemed interested in art, with greater attention directed toward fields such as I.T., film and music. The biggest achievement so far, she noted, is a significant shift in the audience, with growing interest in art and craft and a new set of professional opportunities emerging as the country builds its own cultural infrastructure and ecosystem.
To date, ACDF has reached more than 5 million visitors through exhibitions in Uzbekistan and across 17 countries: from the Louvre and the Arab World Institute in Paris to the Uffizi in Florence, the British Museum in London and the Palace Museum in Beijing.
Meanwhile, in Kazakhstan, the Almaty Museum of Arts opened its doors with the vision and support of local megacollector Nurlan Smagulov, anchored by his own collection of more than 700 works assembled over roughly three decades, with a particular focus on Kazakh and Central Asian art alongside selected international artists. The museum positions Almaty as a destination for major international exhibitions: just this month, it opened “Bill Viola: The Space of Time,” the first large-scale Viola exhibition in Central Asia, bringing together 18 works spanning more than three decades. Nor is the Almaty Museum of Arts the only major institution in the country: back in 2018, Kazakh businessman and entrepreneur Kairat Boranbayev founded the country’s first private cultural institution, the Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture.
From an economic viewpoint, the “Stans” represent one of Eurasia’s fastest-growing subregions. The Asian Development Bank estimated growth across the Caucasus and Central Asia at 5.8 percent in 2025, supported by public investment, remittances, domestic demand and relatively stable macroeconomic conditions. Country-level results were even stronger in several Central Asian states: Kazakhstan’s economy grew 6.5 percent, Uzbekistan’s 7.7 percent, Kyrgyzstan’s 11.1 percent and Tajikistan’s 8.4 percent in 2025.
Central Asia sits strategically between western China and European markets, making it increasingly important to rail, road and logistics networks. China has close ties and growing trade with the region, particularly through the Belt and Road Initiative, which aims to promote connectivity and digital cooperation through cross-border trade, energy projects and transport infrastructure.
The E.U. remains the largest source of foreign direct investment in Central Asia, accounting for more than 40 percent of F.D.I. over the past decade, or more than €100 billion, as Europe tries to reduce its dependence on routes through Russia and on Chinese-controlled supply chains. That push accelerated at the first E.U.-Central Asia summit in Samarkand in April 2025, when the E.U. announced a €12 billion Global Gateway investment package. The plan included support for the Trans-Caspian Transport Corridor, critical minerals, renewable energy and digital links, anchored by the critical Middle Corridor, which moves goods from China through Kazakhstan, across the Caspian Sea and through the South Caucasus to Europe, bypassing Russia.
It is by now clear that culture and cultural diplomacy are set to play a key role in these countries’ political agendas for strategic development, helping convert that economic momentum into tourism, international visibility, urban regeneration and longer-term economic diversification.
This year’s Venice Biennale confirmed Central Asia as a growing force. Until recently, artists from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan were presented collectively at the Central Asian Pavilion; now, the countries each have their own national pavilions.
Particularly ambitious this year is the Uzbekistan Pavilion at the Arsenale, “The Aural Sea,” which brings together newly commissioned and recent works by local and international artists alike—including Jahongir Bobokulov from Uzbekistan, Zi Kakhramonova from Uzbekistan, Aygul Sarsen from Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan, Zulfiya Spowart from Uzbekistan, Xin Liu from China, A.A. Murakami from the U.K. and Japan and Nguyen Phuong Linh from Vietnam—staging a cross-border dialogue between East and West around the disappearance of the Aral Sea and the alternative histories and futures the vanished sea has inspired. Also commissioned by the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation, the pavilion turns to myth, imagination, oral storytelling and elemental memory as ways of confronting collective trauma and shared, era-defining ecological shifts.
Linked to this pavilion as well as to the country’s presentation at Milan Design Week in the spring, the Aral Culture Summit returns this September for a second edition in Nukus, confronting the same themes while expanding the discourse around the Aral basin from a disaster zone into a multispecies home and interconnected social-ecological system.
First launched in April 2025 during the E.U.-Central Asia Climate Forum in Samarkand before continuing in Nukus, the capital of Karakalpakstan, the summit aims to bring together artists, architects, scientists, policymakers, activists and local communities every 18 months to confront the ecological disaster together while envisioning alternative solutions.
Meanwhile, at the Museo Storico Navale, the Kazakhstan Pavilion brings together a group of local artists in an articulated multimedia and poetic dialogue between tradition and technology around the notion of qoñyr, one of the key concepts of Kazakh cosmology, which evokes a sonic register, the scent of earth and an attentiveness to barely perceptible vibrations.
Here, too, the pavilion was commissioned and produced by the government through Aida Balayeva, deputy prime minister and minister of culture and information of the Republic of Kazakhstan. In May, speaking about the Creative Industries Development Fund with Qazaq Culture, Balayeva emphasized how the country no longer sees the creative industries as an auxiliary cultural sphere but as a full-fledged area of economic and social development. “President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev consistently emphasizes unlocking human capital, supporting proactive youth, developing entrepreneurship, and fostering new sources of growth,” she stated. “The creative economy is at the intersection of these objectives. It creates jobs, develops digital content, creates new products, enhances the country’s tourism appeal, and helps to express national identity in a modern language.”
Central Asia’s presence in Venice this year, however, extended well beyond the main venues, with several collateral events that included the region’s scene or focused specifically on it. Palazzo Franchetti, in particular, has become an enclave for Central Asian art this year. On the top floor, London-based foundation Parasol unit is relaunching its programming after a few years of absence with “TURANDOT: To the Daughters of the East,” a broad and articulated group exhibition bringing together works by 11 significant women artists from Central Asia and the wider East. Curated by Dr. Ziba Ardalan, the show features iconic works by some of the most established names from the region, repositioning Central Asian narratives within broader geopolitical and historical frameworks.
At the entrance, an alarmingly red illuminated globe by Mona Hatoum immediately sets the tone for countries that have long been at the center of historical conflicts and geopolitical shifts, while video works by Lida Abdul and Tala Madani expose, through different documentary and animated registers, the physical and emotional weight of shared histories shaped by conflict, displacement and erasure.
Among the most affecting works is Kazakh-Tajik artist Nazira Karimi’s Return Policy, a ghostly forest of 40 off-white dresses suspended from unusually tall racks, forming a floating chorus and a silent crowd gathered in protest. The installation refers to chilla, the Tajik tradition that requires brides to wear 40 national dresses over the 40 days following their wedding. Each garment here has been dipped in cement, transforming the dresses into heavy, shrine-like monuments to women constrained by cultural expectations and to the “returned brides” sent back to their families after failed marriages.
Elsewhere, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan’s The Dream of a Falling Star traces stories of apocalypse through the morphology of stone, treating geological matter as an accumulation of time and memory. Meanwhile, haunting projections activate paintings by the late Iranian artist Farideh Lashai, evoking lost truths and innocence, while Madina Joldybek weaves maternal histories into textiles that become threads of resilience, tenderness and remembrance.
Taking over an entire room, Huma Bhabha’s otherworldly, totemic figures, assembled from wheels, cork and fractured forms, appear to function as contemporary memento mori: broken and reassembled bodies mapping the damaged human condition. Next door, Saodat Ismailova’s film 18,000 Worlds, a “video talisman,” draws on archival fragments, Central Asian cultural memory and the Sufi belief that the material world is only one among 18,000 realms, bringing viewers into contact with the region’s rich heritage of layered mythologies, shaped across centuries of encounters and exchanges among Iranian, Indo-European, Bactrian, Turkic, Mongol, shamanistic and Zoroastrian traditions.
In the last room, Afruz Amighi’s Opium House Tears presents itself as a fragile architectural apparition, suspended like the ghost of a column or mausoleum. Chains made from emptied Bic pen casings and crystal drops catch the light, turning vessels once associated with writing—and later used to smoke opium—into a poetic structure of sorrow, purification and transformation. Suspended between sanctuary and ruin, the work suggests a material axis connecting earth and cosmos, light and darkness, remembrance and loss, and is tied to the region’s deep ancestral roots.
Drawing from the mythical heroine whose story is anchored in Persian literature and was later made internationally famous through Puccini’s opera, the show links the figure back to the Persian term Turandokht, or “daughter of Turan,” a historical and geographical region northeast of Iran known today as Central Asia, including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Together with other regions such as Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan, Turkey and Iran were once integral parts of the broader Persian cultural sphere. Reframing the etymology and symbolism beyond centuries of European Orientalism, the show unveils the many cultural threads—myths, symbols, traditions, shared historical traumas and current political concerns—that connect the fates of women across this geographical and historical region.
Running alongside on the first floor, the CCA anticipated its programming with its first off-site exhibition in Venice, “Instruments of the Mind,” which aimed to bring the pioneering conceptual art of Uzbek artist Vyacheslav Akhunov to international attention.
Spanning five decades of his career and bringing early works into dialogue with projects realized for the first time, the show is a real gem for anyone hoping to learn something new about the region’s contemporary art history. Akhunov came of age as an artist in the 1970s. He completed his education in Moscow and returned to Uzbekistan, becoming one of the first artists to approach conceptual themes while remaining based in Tashkent; other Uzbek artists were working abroad, but his studio and life remained there.
At the time, the country was still under Soviet control, which isolated it from the world. Akhunov studied in Moscow and connected with nonconformist artists, but conceptual art and contemporary art were not taught, while modernism was officially condemned. Yet reproductions in critical Soviet journals, Polish magazines and books brought by a Finnish friend allowed him to reconstruct developments beyond the Soviet Union, he told Observer through a translator.
In this way, Akhunov managed to develop his own rigorously conceptual practice even after returning to the country, working across drawing, text, installation and collage, with a document-based minimalist aesthetic not far from the research of his colleagues in the U.S.—particularly the institutional critique of Hans Haacke or the more coded strategies of satire and critique first pioneered by Duchamp and Broodthaers. “Much of this work began in the 1970s, in a time when ideas often had to exist quietly, even invisibly,” says the artist in a statement.
When Observer visited the show, Raza, who curated it, described Akhunov as an “anti-chronological artist.” For this reason, she decided not to adopt a conventional chronological format for the survey and instead fluidly combined historical works with newly realized installations based on sketches from the 1970s that had remained hidden for decades in the artist’s studio drawers—many of which are being presented publicly for the first time. The distinction between historical and new work simply collapses: older ideas are not merely revisited but activated in the present. Importantly, we learned that the show also initiated research toward a catalogue raisonné, distinguishing sketches, completed objects and unrealized proposals across an archive of more than 4,000 works.
At its core is Akhunov’s longstanding investigation of slogans as secular “mantras.” Mantras were an important part of his daily artistic and civic life growing up in the Soviet Union, when Uzbekistan was still the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, Raza explained. Beginning in 1974, Akhunov developed repetitive textual interventions on found materials—sewing patterns, newspapers, magazines and books—using writing as both resistance and critical inquiry. Works such as Modeling (1974-84), Crack (1988) and Red Line of the Party (1974-75) show his attempts to reverse-engineer language and expose the absurdity and violence embedded in systems of command.
The first, in particular, originated in a seamstress’s pattern book that Akhunov found abandoned in the street. He filled the negative spaces of standardized clothing patterns with slogans and directives, transforming them into what the curator called “garments for obedience.” Language and ideology are no longer abstract commands but a system of values fitted to and embedded within everyday life.
Letters and diagrams recur throughout the exhibition as architectural forms. Akhunov examined Soviet literacy campaigns, the imposition of the Cyrillic script and the ideological power embedded in typography. Enlarged letters become buildings or monuments, while matchbox installations model political hierarchy. In one work containing roughly 25,000 matches, a single match rises above the collective, visualizing how systems of power elevate one figure through the support of many.
Several of the installations were conceived in the 1970s and 1980s as drawings, diagrams and written instructions but remained unrealized because of limited funding and institutional support. One of these is Triumphal Arch (1979/2026), which functions as a portal to the show. With metal scissors covering the opening, the ceremonial arch critiques grand ribbon-cutting spectacles, a state ritual celebrating the completion of new infrastructure projects.
To defy censorship and circulate his work during the Soviet period, Akhunov created miniature exhibitions in matchboxes that could be carried in a suitcase and installed anywhere. He conceived this portable model in the mid-1970s, creating approximately 5,000 matchbox works, showcased in Venice as a tower. If expanded, the project would extend for approximately one kilometer and contain hundreds of miniature images.
Another work addresses labor migration through photographs carried by people leaving home. A large amount of sand placed between them becomes a powerful symbol of large-scale migration, as Akhunov compares migrants to grains of sand: when the wind of a difficult situation blows, the particles move elsewhere and form another dune, much like economic displacement and the continual re-formation of communities, which disperse individual fates and memories.
His final installation contains a narrow opening. Looking through it, you see light at the end, as though at the end of a road or a life. “I wanted it to conclude the exhibition. After moving through works about memory, ideology and historical experience, the visitor arrives at this final threshold,” Akhunov explained through his translator, revealing how the work can also be read as a symbolic metaphor for his country’s history and its possible future direction.
Throughout the show, Akhunov’s art is traversed by this continuous conversation with memory, humor and spiritual persistence, eventually offering a snapshot of the country’s past sociopolitical and psychological condition while also proving how thought and creativity always survived and thrived within it, even when the Western world remained largely unaware of it.
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