I didn’t expect to feel anything walking into the Bukhara Art Gallery on a Tuesday afternoon.
But there’s something disorienting about standing in front of Dilshod Karimov’s massive canvas—maybe eight feet tall, give or take—where traditional suzani embroidery patterns bleed into what looks like Soviet-era propaganda posters, except the figures are faceless and the colors are all wrong. The exhibition, running through late autumn, showcases roughly twelve contemporary Uzbek artists whose work spans everything from hyperrealistic oil paintings of decaying madrassas to digital collages that layer Arabic calligraphy over photographs of Tashkent’s brutalist architecture. It’s messy. Some pieces feel unfinished, like the artist got exhausted halfway through and said “good enough.” I used to think contemporary Central Asian art was all about nostalgia for the Silk Road—you know, romantic depictions of caravans and blue-tiled domes—but this exhibition throws that assumption in your face and doesn’t apologize. Malika Agzamova’s video installation loops footage of her grandmother weaving carpets while a distorted recording of a Spotify playlist (yes, really) plays overhead, mixing traditional Uzbek folk music with what I’m pretty sure is a Billie Eilish track. The curator told me it’s about “temporal dislocation,” which honestly sounds like academic jargon, but watching it for ten minutes, I started to get it—or maybe I just convinced myself I did.
When Modernism Crashes Into Five Thousand Years of Tradition (And Nobody Knows What to Call It)
Here’s the thing: Uzbekistan’s art scene exists in this weird liminal space between honoring a heritage that dates back to, what, roughly 3000 BCE if we’re counting the Bactrian civilization, and trying to figure out what it means to be a contemporary artist in a post-Soviet, increasingly globalized context. Rustam Khalikov’s series of photographs—grainy, underexposed shots of abandoned Soviet factories in Samarkand—sit next to Sevara Akbarova’s vibrant abstract paintings that recieve their color palette directly from traditional ikat textiles. The juxtaposition shouldn’t work, but it does, in that uncomfortable way where you’re not sure if you’re supposed to appreciate the aesthetic tension or if the curator just ran out of wall space. I spent maybe twenty minutes staring at Jasur Ibragimov’s sculpture, which is literally a stack of old Soviet-era school desks welded together with copper wire shaped into Islamic geometric patterns. One of the desk drawers was slightly open, and inside someone had placed a small LED screen playing footage of the Registan at night.
Anyway, the gallery itself is housed in a restored 19th-century merchant’s house in Bukhara’s old city, which adds another layer of context—or maybe just confusion. Walking through rooms with hand-painted ceilings and carved wooden columns while looking at Aziza Kadyrova’s neon installations that literally spell out Uzbek proverbs in hot pink and electric blue creates this cognitive dissonance that I guess is the point? The youngest artist in the show, twenty-four-year-old Bobur Ismailov, works primarily in augmented reality, which means you have to download an app to see half of his piece—a virtual overlay of pre-Islamic Zoroastrian symbols floating above a canvas that’s otherwise just blank white linen.
The Economics of Being Seen When Your Art Market Barely Exists Yet
Wait—maybe I should mention that most of these artists can’t actually make a living from their work.
The Uzbek contemporary art market is practically nonexistent compared to, say, the scenes in Istanbul or Dubai, and most of the artists here teach, work in graphic design, or have family money. Karimov told me in broken English (my Uzbek is nonexistant, so we met somewhere in the middle with Russian) that he’s sold maybe three pieces in the last two years, all to private collectors in Germany who happened to see his work at a group show in Berlin. Agzamova funds her video installations through a combination of government grants—which apparently exist now, though the application process sounds Byzantine—and money from her day job managing a coffee shop in Tashkent. There’s this undercurrent of frustration in a lot of the work, this sense of artists shouting into a void where the international art world hasn’t quite figured out that Central Asia exists beyond orientalist clichés and the domestic audience is still figuring out whether contemporary art is even “real” art. Akbarova’s artist statement, printed on a small card next to her paintings, includes the line “I paint because I don’t know what else to do with this feeling,” which is probably the most honest thing I’ve read in a gallery in years. The exhibition closes in November, and I have no idea what happens to these pieces after that—storage, probably, or maybe someone’s living room in Bukhara where they’ll hang next to family photos and slowly accumulate dust.
