Recipes for Broken Hearts: The Bukhara Biennale as Heritage Spectacle and Critical Absence
Bukhara, Uzbekistan, September 5—November 20, 2025
The inaugural Bukhara Biennale, Recipes for Broken Hearts, enters the global art scene with immense ambition. Presented as the first large-scale contemporary art event in Uzbekistan and, more broadly, in Central Asia, it has been framed as a milestone in the region’s cultural visibility. Its location, among caravanserais, restored madrasas, and public squares of one of the oldest Silk Road cities, appears designed to merge heritage and futurity. Yet beneath this image of cultural arrival lies a complex interplay of state strategy, curatorial positioning, and political silence.
The guidebook lists close to two hundred named participants—contemporary artists working with artisans, ceramicists, embroiderers, woodcarvers, and textile makers. All of the works in the exhibition are newly produced commissions, created specifically for this edition of the Biennale. Most craftspeople are based in Uzbekistan, drawn from Bukhara and other regions, while the artists include local practitioners, Central Asian contributors, and international participants from the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The Biennale thus connects Uzbekistan to global art circuits, with participants from Brazil, China, Japan, India, the Gulf, and the EU, however, neighboring post-Soviet republics have limited presence. The result is a cartography in which Uzbekistan is actively repositioned within a Global South trajectory, while its Soviet past and regional entanglements are largely bracketed.
As an artist and curator born in Ukraine and based in Israel, I approached the Biennale from a position that was both proximate and distant. Uzbekistan was once part of the same Soviet constellation that shaped my own cultural background, and many of its current negotiations—over heritage, memory, and state power—are legible through that shared history. At the same time, working in a different post-Soviet and postcolonial context made me aware of how large-scale events can both reveal and obscure political realities. Here, the question of a “non-Western perspective” is especially complex: multiple non-Western perspectives—Central Asian, Islamic, post-Soviet, Global South—coexist, each positioning Bukhara as peripheral in different ways.
Dana Awartani (Palestine/Saudi Arabia) in collaboration with Behzod Turdiyev (Uzbekistan). Standing by the Ruins IV, 2025. Rashid Madrasa. Photograph by Vera Gailis.
The Biennale was launched at a moment when Uzbekistan is investing heavily in cultural diplomacy and creative infrastructure. Over the last decade, the state has launched or expanded institutions such as the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Tashkent and the forthcoming National Museum of Uzbekistan, and it has positioned art and heritage as drivers of a “creative economy.” The Bukhara Biennale is presented as one of the key steps on this path, a signature project of the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation and the Republic of Uzbekistan State Committee for Tourism Development.
The funding structure reinforces this scheme. The Biennale is underwritten by state cultural foundations and the Bukhara regional government, supported by national heritage agencies, and augmented by private patrons connected to tourism development and real-estate projects in the historic center. Private sponsors also play a visible role, including companies with Russian-facing or Russia-linked affiliations. These layered alliances complicate the narrative of cultural renewal: the event positions itself as a site of international exchange while relying on actors whose economic and geopolitical interests are anything but neutral.
The artistic director of the Biennale is Diana Campbell, an American curator with a long-standing career across South and Southeast Asia. Educated at Princeton and embedded in Euro-American institutional networks, Campbell is best known for her leadership of the Dhaka Art Summit and for articulating a model of “soft curating” grounded in care, collaboration, and long-term support outside Western market circuits. In her curatorial statement for Bukhara, the heart functions as the central metaphor: a locus of identity and loss, a site that bridges material and spiritual worlds, a seat of “imaginative intelligence” capable of transforming reality through art. Heartbreak, she suggests, is a universal condition that can become a space of transformation where art acts as a tool for “worldmaking” through tenderness, attention, and shared vulnerability.
However, “soft curating” enters a different configuration in a post-Soviet authoritarian republic with a majority-Muslim society marked by decades of Soviet secularism and a recent state-led religious revival, and with a cultural scene closely aligned with presidential agendas and heritage branding. In such a context, a curatorial rhetoric centered on healing a “universal heartbreak” risks operating as a buffer between viewers and more uncomfortable questions: which wounds are being acknowledged, which are displaced onto safely distant geographies, and which remain structurally unspoken?
Official statements and catalogue texts portray Bukhara as a place where “the wisdom of artisans” meets “global creative exchange.” The rhetoric emphasizes slowness, care, material sensitivity, and intergenerational knowledge. Artisans appear as custodians of timeless skills, while visiting artists are cast as translators of a “shared language” of emotion and form. These ideas are seductive, but when detached from Uzbekistan’s complex histories, they slide easily into romantic essentialism. Craft is treated less as a site of socialist modernization, gendered and racialized labor, industrial reorganization, and post-independence commodification, and more as a symbolic resource that can stabilize identity and soothe “universal heartbreak.”
This aestheticization also shapes how heritage is staged. Bukhara’s historic center—its caravanserais, madrasas, mosques, and squares—serves as both a visual reference and a choreographed backdrop. Installations are arranged in apparent harmony with ornament and brickwork; materials echo local textures, while textiles and ceramics wrap facades and soften edges. Yet the dominant narrative remains the Silk Road: Bukhara as a crossroads and sanctuary of craftsmanship in a romanticized East–West geography. Only a small part of the exhibition confronts Soviet-era repression, deportations, ideological engineering, land-use changes—above all, the forced conversion of diverse agricultural landscapes into cotton monoculture and the redirection of rivers for irrigation, or the erasure and displacement of communities.
This tension becomes particularly sharp in relation to the Biennale’s overarching theme—its search for “recipes for broken hearts,” a metaphor for healing collective and individual trauma. Any process of healing necessarily unfolds in stages, and one of its essential steps is the ability to name and articulate trauma itself. A country, such as Uzbekistan, that emerged from the grip of an empire only a few decades ago, requires such a process no less than any territory undergoing postcolonial transformation. These contexts need space to speak openly, to call things by their names, and to face what has been silenced. Without this acknowledgement, any proposed “remedy” risks becoming ineffective or even populist, because true healing cannot occur in the absence of truth.
Reading through the catalogue, the curatorial voice walks a tightrope: violence and erasure are invoked in abstract terms, but causal chains and political agents behind twentieth-century traumas remain largely unnamed. The texts speak of “cultural erasure” and carefully describe mosques and madrasas being closed and repurposed as housing, workshops, or museums, yet the regime behind this secularization—the Soviet state—is rarely mentioned. Likewise, works on cotton industrialization, the Aral Sea’s disappearance, soil salinization, and the clash between handwork and mechanized production clearly imply legacies of Soviet economic policy, but these are presented as abstract “historical forces,” detached from specific structures of power and responsibility.
Against this backdrop, the near absence of language politics is striking. “Language” appears primarily in metaphorical registers—the language of birds, abstraction, gesture, ornament—while the actual linguistic landscape of the region (Uzbek, Tajik, Karakalpak, Russian, and others) is barely articulated. Soviet policies of russification, shifts from Arabic to Latin to Cyrillic scripts, and the resulting hierarchies between languages are not addressed in any sustained way.
A similar strategy of oblique silence shapes the treatment of minorities and small nations. Among the many communities that have passed through or settled in Uzbekistan, only a few are named. The Koryo-saram (Korean diaspora), whose history of Stalinist deportation from the Russian Far East to Central Asia is foregrounded in Daria Kim’s Hive Settlers and in Jeong Kwan’s collaboration with the Korean community, stand out as one of the rare exceptions where history is articulated. Standing inside Hive Settlers—a multi-channel video installation animating Koryo-saram paintings and family stories—I encounter some of the rare explicit Soviet symbols in the Biennale. Here, they come across as agents of harm: on trains, uniforms, red banners woven into haunted domestic scenes. Jeong Kwan’s project, built around making kimchi with Koryo-saram in Uzbekistan and leading food meditations in a former mosque, translates this history into a practice of everyday care. Together, the two works form a nearly complete cycle: they identify the wound, propose a “recipe” for living with it, and offer a concrete methodology for how that recipe can be practiced.
Other groups—Karakalpaks, Tajiks, Kazakhs, Turkmens, Kyrgyz, Tatars, and others—are not mentioned at all, even in works that address territories historically tied to these communities, such as the Aral Sea region. While a few diasporic voices are amplified, the broader multiethnic fabric of Uzbekistan—and its Soviet and imperial pasts—remains largely in the shadows.
Saule Suleimenova (Kazakhstan) in collaboration with Shiru Shakar (Uzbekistan). Kutadgu Bilig, 2024–2025. Installation in Public Space. Photograph by Vera Gailis.
The Biennale’s use of public space is one of its most striking and ambivalent features. Many works occupy squares, streets, and courtyards, inserting textile, ceramic, sculptural, and video installations into the daily paths of residents and tourists. Some are finely attuned to the city’s fabric, as Saule Suleimenova’s Kutadgu Bilig, a translucent cloud of painted plastic bags collected in Bukhara, created in collaboration with retired performers of the Shiru Shakar ensemble. The piece, while turning post-Soviet plastic waste into a fragile skin for a collective portrait of the ensemble’s members, doubles as an image of environmental fragility and a temporary stage asserting the visibility of older women. Oyjon Khayrullaeva’s project embeds mosaics of human organs into facades and architectural surfaces across several sites. At first glance, they follow the city’s ornamental logic of tiles, grids, and repetition; only upon closer inspection do lungs, hearts, and other organs become visible, often fractured or incomplete. The artist links the work to mental and physical health, and in situ, it reads as a reminder that bodies are inscribed into the city, that restoration cannot erase internal fractures. Within a Biennale fluent in the language of care, these organs introduce a more unsettling note: care here responds to damage that remains exposed rather than healed.
Oyjon Khayrullaeva (Uzbekistan), in collaboration with Raxmon Toirov and Rauf Taxirov (Uzbekistan). Eight Lives, 2024–2025. Caravanserai and multiple locations across the Biennale. Photograph by Vera Gailis.
Yet these works also reveal the limits of the Biennale’s approach to publicness. Many installations are visually prominent but physically cordoned off, monitored by staff. This is understandable from a conservation perspective, but in the aggregate, it produces a distinctive tension: public space is activated and beautified, yet access is tightly managed. The politics of tenderness—its ethic of care—subtly expands into an aesthetic of reassurance and control. The city is invited to host contemporary art, but the terms of engagement remain framed by institutional regulation rather than spontaneous encounter.
Within this landscape, Dana Awartani’s Standing by the Ruins IV emerges as one of the Biennale’s central works. Installed in the courtyard of the Rashid Madrasa, it reconstructs the patterned floor of the historic Hamam al-Sammara in Gaza, destroyed in 2023. Using clay from Palestine Awartani reconstitutes a fragment of vanished architecture. Viewers circle the work, looking down onto fragile geometric motifs that represent both durability and precarity. Here, the Biennale’s rhetoric of heartbreak and healing is grounded in specific, recent violence: the ruin is not abstract but tied to a named place and a concrete act of destruction.
At the same time, evoking Gaza as a primary site of ruin highlights what remains unspoken about Bukhara itself. Just over a century ago, around 1920, the city was subjected to bombardment during the Red Army’s campaign against the Emirate of Bukhara, leading to fires, structural damage, and the eventual incorporation of the emirate into the Soviet Union. These events profoundly impacted Bukhara’s urban and social fabric, yet they do not figure in the Biennale’s narratives. No corresponding work addresses the city’s own history of violent destruction. Gaza becomes a universal symbol of pain, while Bukhara’s local trauma lingers in silence.
A telling counterpoint appears outside the Biennale’s official frame. The Bukhara Art Museum, marked on the festival map though not officially part of the event, has recently rehung its permanent collection. The galleries show works shaped by imperial Russian academic training and later Soviet socialist realism, forming a dense visual record of how local culture was refracted through those regimes. Among them is a painting by Filipp Gavrilov from the 1950s depicting the Kalon Mosque, partially ruined after early Soviet bombardments of Bukhara. In contrast to the Biennale’s carefully mediated tenderness, this ostensibly “non-contemporary” display quietly testifies to the violence that marked the city’s modern history. Here, the local wound is named and pictured, suggesting that the most direct image of Bukhara’s broken heart lies not in the new biennial routes but in the halls of its municipal museum.
Philip Gavrilov. Kalyan Minaret, Bukhara. 1950s. Bukhara Museum of Fine Art, Photograph by Vera Gailis.
International reception of the Biennale has been enthusiastic. Visitors and reviewers praise its beauty, craftsmanship, and organizational sophistication, presenting it as a transformative moment for Central Asia and proof that Uzbekistan can “host” major contemporary art events. The logistical achievement of installing large-scale works in fragile heritage sites is widely celebrated. Yet this praise, while deserved, risks reinforcing the Biennale’s own tendency to privilege spectacle over interrogation, confirming its success as a stage while saying little about the narratives it chooses to spotlight—or to leave unspoken.
Compared to other art events in the post-Soviet space, Bukhara’s tone is notably gentle and conciliatory. Kyiv’s recent biennials and triennials have foregrounded political urgency, war, and decolonial critique; Tbilisi’s platforms have wrestled with post-Soviet identity and contested memory. Bukhara, by contrast, opts for reconciliation, affirmation, and a carefully curated poetics of care. This difference reflects not only curatorial temperament but also Uzbekistan’s political climate, which remains tightly controlled even as it projects an image of openness and reform.
These critiques do not diminish the accomplishment. The Bukhara Biennale mobilizes substantial resources, brings global attention to a long-marginalized region, and offers visibility to artists who merit international recognition. It experiments with public space, supports collaborations between local artisans and international practitioners, and seeks a language of care rather than conflict. Yet to sustain international attention, it must move beyond soft architectures of care toward a more rigorous engagement with its own political and historical context.
Among all the peripheries and postcolonial trajectories to which Uzbekistan belongs, the most dominant remains the post-Soviet one—a context that, for much of the former Soviet space, is still an open wound. Here, it is not only a question of historical legacy: as I noted earlier, the biennial itself remains financially entangled with Russia. For Uzbekistan to cultivate a contemporary art scene capable of shaping discourse rather than merely reflecting it, critical and sustained engagement with this dependency is essential.
