BUKHARA, Uzbekistan — On the surface, the inaugural Bukhara Biennial is a stunner. The event manages, in flashes, to make one believe in the promise of culture as connective tissue and to forget the ulterior motive of the event. The title, Recipes for Broken Hearts, is apt. Bukhara is a city that has had its heart broken many times: by Mongols, by the Russian Empire, by the Soviets, and now by developers and autocratic rule. Despite all of this, there is still real transcendent beauty in the city, which the biennial highlights and even amplifies.
Under the artistic direction of Diana Campbell with Gayane Umerova, the biennial has transformed unused caravanserais, madrasas, and one mosque into a maze of miniature galleries. The structure of the old city’s architecture — with honeycombs of small rooms clustered around courtyards — makes it an exceptional fit for contemporary art. It’s a wonder that no one has used these spaces for art installations before.
All of the 70-plus artworks were by Uzbek artists, who occasionally collaborated with a foreign artist. This allowed the exhibition to avoid a common biennial pitfall in which foreign artists are merely decorative additions, parachuted in. The result is a show that didn’t feel like a mimicry of tired biennial aesthetics. Importantly, all of the Uzbek participants are given equal billing.
One example is the lovely piece “Longing” (2025), which runs through the site, by the Indian and British duo Hylozoic/Desires in collaboration with Uzbek artist Rasuljon Mirzaahmedov. Bands of locally made ikat textiles measuring around 1.24 miles (two kilometers) are woven through the city’s underground water passages, popping up across the exhibition in surprising places, stitching the space together. The work asks us to reflect on collective trauma and the continuity of social behavior, seen and unseen.
“Eight Lives” (2024–25) by Oyjon Khayrullaeva in collaboration with Raxmon Toirov and Rauf Taxiro
Another impressive work that spans multiple locations is “Eight Lives” (2024–25) by Oyjon Khayrullaeva in collaboration with Raxmon Toirov and Rauf Taxiro, all Uzbek artists. Its three pieces use Uzbekistan’s traditional blue ceramics to reference intergenerational female networks of care in Bukharian culture. They feature an oversized liver, lung, and heart with medical herbs selected by Khayrullaeva’s grandmother and a Bukharian herbalist.
At an October 6 panel hosted by the biennial, University of Pittsburgh Professor James Pickett pointed out that the artists whose work occupies rooms in the old town bring us closer to recreating Bukhara’s authentic historical texture than any “restoration” that preceded it. The Soviets imposed an antiseptic vision starting in the 1920s, stripping away centuries of overlapping layers in the historic areas of the city to create memorialized buildings that mirrored their imagined ideal of the original structures. The biennial transformed the buildings back into spaces with multiple meanings and eras represented.
Before Russian colonization began in the 19th century, the city was an intellectual capital of the Islamic world, home to mathematicians, astronomers, and poets. The biennial’s best works understand this inheritance.
Palestinian-Saudi artist Dana Awartani, for instance, presents “Standing by the Ruins IV” 2025 in partnership with Uzbek artist Behzod Turdiyev as a statement of remembrance and continuance. According to the wall text, the title draws upon “wuqūf ‘alā al—at.lāl,” a pre-Islamic poetic form that typically explores themes of love, destruction, and the passage of time. Using clay sourced from Palestine, the piece reconstructs the lost geometric motifs of Gaza’s historic 14th-century Hammam al-Sammara, or Samra Bath, destroyed in 2023 by Israeli bombs.
Dana Awartani with Behzod Turdiyev, “Standing by the Ruins IV” (2025)
Also crucial to the success of the biennial was the local audience. On the days I visited, the courtyards were full of Uzbeks: women with gold teeth, teenagers in knockoff Balenciaga, men in square Uzbek skullcaps, college kids, flaneurs. Locals who seemed to be enjoying the art. Importantly for the nation whose average per capita income is just north of $3,000 a year, the exhibition is free.
A volunteer guide, who asked not to be named as talking freely in an authoritarian country always carries risks, told me, “Uzbek people are proud of this event. This is the first biennial like this in Central Asia. They like the Uzbek-language the best but are also very happy to see the insides of these buildings, which were closed for a long time before.”
Still, there are barriers to enjoying the biennial. My arrival in the capital city of Tashkent began with a shakedown. I ended up paying $200 to get into the country. After decades of living in Asia, Europe, and West Africa, this was my first bribe. Later, a hotel clerk launched into a George Wallace-inspired lecture about how “America needs segregation again.” Incel paranoia and racism have a transnational uniformity.
Uzbekistan, for all its superlative safety and charm, sometimes feels unnerving. In Samarkand’s markets, I saw grey wolf skin and teeth sellers — representing the large and violent Turkic fascist group — beside refrigerator magnet and scarf vendors. In my short stay, I saw two fights break out on the street between bridal parties.
The elegant biennial guidebooks and maps were on display but not for sale. Visitors were told by biennial staff not to look at them too long, lest they damage them. Uzbekistan may not be ready for art tourism yet.
Perhaps most troubling is the question of why this event is happening at all. Artwashing, the practice of using art to cover up structural abuses, is not new. From Azerbaijan’s YARAT Center to Saudi Arabia’s Desert X AlUla, regimes have learned that art is effective propaganda. It rebrands nations, softens images, and seduces journalists. The Bukhara Biennial, for all its sincerity and fantastic work, is a part of this system.
The old city quarters in Bukhara
Artwashing has a long history in this region. Timur (Tamerlane), the 14th-century conqueror of Samarkand, was a progenitor of the technique. Timur kidnapped and forcibly relocated artisans from across his empire to construct a city of remarkable beauty. Today, he is less known for widespread slaughter than for his architectural and artistic achievements.
The logic is similar today: Power is legitimized and laundered through art. Recipes for Broken Hearts is full of genuine brilliance — artists grappling with heritage, identity, and trauma in spectacular settings. Yet the biennial is supported by the state-funded Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation. Its very existence depends on a restrictive autocratic structure. Since the death of Uzbekistan’s first post-Soviet strongman Islam Karimov, who normalized human rights atrocities, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has pursued modernization. However, Amnesty International continues to report widespread censorship, violation of LGBTQ+ rights, and harassment of journalists. In 2022, protests in the autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan were violently suppressed, leaving around two dozen dead and over 270 injured. Yet these are rarely discussed in the same breath as Uzbekistan’s new cultural projects, including among art publications.
The Bukhara Biennial seems to signal an openness in line with Mirziyoyev’s campaign to make the city a centerpiece of tourism. Against this backdrop, UNESCO has expressed concern about massive government development potentially destroying the character of the old city. Alerte Héritage, a non-governmental organization dedicated to the protection of Central Asia’s architectural cultural heritage, has called the government’s plan to transform Bukhara “catastrophic in every respect.” The Bukhara Biennial did not answer Hyperallergic’s questions about the government’s involvement in the exhibition.
One can see this kind of development in other places. While trying to track down the Museum of People’s Friendship and Religious Tolerance in Samarkand, I found the building had been turned into a fast food restaurant that advertised a dish called jiz-biz in bold letters on a sign spanning the former museum’s Corinthian columns. Development is rampant and flattening in Uzbekistan.
Hera Büyüktasciyan and Isiom Khudoyberdiev, “Under the Mulberry Tree, the Wind Sang Our Names” (2024–25) spans multiple rooms inside the former Rashid Madrasa. (photo courtesy the Bukhara Biennial)
Despite the artwashing, the biennial matters. It does not have the sanitized, apolitical feel of a dictator’s vanity show. Even as the state tries to use art to polish its image, the artists produced work that is important, valid, and validating. The art was generally good and occasionally great: There were edges to some of the work that did not always feel safe.
“Under the Mulberry Tree, the Wind Sang Our Names” (2024–25), spanning three rooms inside the former Rashid Madrasa, was one such work. The piece by Hera Büyüktasciyan, a Turkish artist of Armenian ethnicity, and Uzbek artist Isiom Khudoyberdiev features distorted black forms with half-finished musical instruments carved from mulberry wood. The otherworldly soundscape thuds, wails, and clangs. Büyüktasciyan wrote in the wall text, “Coming to this land of mulberry trees resonated with cycles of sacrifice, skin-changing and coexistence. Reminiscing of my great grandmother, a silkworm farmer from Bardizag, I wanted to look at the mulberry tree as a vessel through musical instruments carved through its body.” The artist uses the Indigenous Armenian name for the town of Bardizag, now renamed Bahgecik by the Turkish government. As a Turkish citizen, Büyüktasciyan is making work about the Armenian Genocide, which is still denied and forbidden in public discourse in her country.
The Bukhara Biennial is an illusion, an oasis in a desert of repression. There are moments when it is a beautiful, affecting, and wonderful mirage. It will be interesting to see if the new Centre for Contemporary Arts, opening in the more industrial and less poetic capital city of Tashkent under the direction of Sara Raza (known for anodyne curation as well as a track record of catering to dictators), will capture the same bold magic.
Recipes for Broken Hearts continues at various sites across Bukhara, Uzbekistan, through November 20. The exhibition was curated by Diana Campbell.
