A Historic Crossroads for Uzbekistan’s Art Scene

As Uzbekistan continues to shape its image on the global stage, its presence at this year's Venice Biennale feels somewhat like a historical reckoning. It circles an essential tension in the country’s artistic and architectural ambitions: how do you assert a new cultural identity without simply inheriting the monumental hubris of the old one?

Tashkent’s built identity was predominantly forged in the aftermath of the 1966 earthquake, when the city was reconstructed as a showcase Soviet capital. The scale was deliberate and the splendour ideological. Today, Uzbekistan’s capital remains defined by monumentality and planned spectacle, no longer in service to ideological propaganda, perhaps, but certainly in staking a claim on the artworld stage. Several grand architectural ambitions are taking shape: the renovation and expansion of the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), which reopens in September, and a new National Museum slated for completion in 2028.

It is into this context that Vyacheslav Akhunov’s Venice exhibition arrives. The long-ostracised Uzbek artist, silenced for decades by Soviet authorities and later the Karimov regime over his political associations and criticism of communism, has spent decades dissecting the language and edifice of authoritarian spectacle, sub rosa. “The mantras and language that Akhunov engages with in his practice were a common fixture in the public realm throughout most of his lifetime,” says exhibition curator Sara Raza. “Various state apparatus such as schools, hospitals, museums and metro stations would feature different odes to Lenin.” His solo show for Venice, Instruments of the Mind, brings together works initially conceived during the 1970s but left unrealised under political and institutional censorship, marking the first fullscale presentation of many of his most provocative and anticipatory proposals.

Vyacheslav Akhunov, Triumphal Arch, 1979–2026 (installation view). Courtesy Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF)

Undoubtedly the most poignant among these is Triumphal Arch. Developed in 1979, a period when televised inaugurations were ubiquitous in Soviet Uzbekistan, the arch is realised by Akhunov in Venice as a meditation on performance, repetition and state theatre. Punctured along its inner curve with scissors and shears, it reads as a sardonic monument to the perpetuity of ceremonial ribbon-cutting. “Those with a critically attuned mind will understand its contemporary significance,” the artist tells The Art Journal wryly. With Trump’s 76-metre ‘Arc de Trump’ cleared for construction in Washington, DC, the resonance is not lost, though it extends well beyond the US.

The familiarity may in fact be sharpest in Tashkent itself, where the symbolic grammar Akhunov once subverted is being redeployed in a soft-power play. Gayane Umerova, chairperson of the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation, is candid about the ambition behind the CCA’s expansion. “When we first envisioned the CCA I knew I wanted it to be open to all – a place for inspiration, dialogue, opportunity and a hub for the community,” she says. “Through sustained investment in cultural infrastructure and programming, we are, for the first time, building a creative economy across Uzbekistan.”

The decision to engage international architects – French-founded Studio KO for the CCA, Japanese architect Tadao Ando for the National Museum – extends invitations to global cultural discourse, a crucial departure from atomised Soviet urban aspirations. Uzbekistan’s contemporary institution-building and architectural patronage are looking out, advancing hand in hand with its growing tourism sector. The inaugural Bukhara Biennial last year, which exhibited works by the likes of Antony Gormley and Wael Shawky, brought over a million-and-a-half visitors to the city. “This isn’t just a phase in Uzbekistan’s history, it’s a conviction,” reflects Umerova. “We’re at a historic crossroads for cultural exchange and we are building institutions that reflect that.”

Akhunov’s belated appraisal on the world stage should, however, at least give us pause. It’s an unsubtly ironic testimony to the toll authoritarianism takes on artistic expression, and to the ease with which history repeats itself. For the best part of his career, Akhunov conceived his artworks within the landlocked borders of Uzbekistan. During Soviet rule and under the pseudo-reformist presidency of Islam Karimov, he was not permitted to leave the country and would even hide drawings between the pages of cookbooks to elude the KGB. In 2013, authorities forbade him from attending the Venice Biennale, where his work was on exhibit as part of the Central Asian Pavilion.

As recently as 2023, a painting of Akhunov’s depicting the Bolshevik assault on the Silk Road citadel of Bukhara in 1920 was to see the end of its more-than-three-decade exile from Uzbekistan in an exhibition at the state art museum in Tashkent. However, when Akhunov arrived, he found it wrapped in cellophane and tightly guarded. A predictable pretext followed: “They said that the museum didn’t have the time to document the painting before the exhibition, which I don’t think was the case,” the artist says.

In the 2025 annual Press Freedom Index, Uzbekistan ranked 148th out of 180 countries. Despite current president Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s comparatively progressive approach to governance, according to Reporters Without Borders the authorities still largely control the media, and those journalists who have had the courage to speak out have been harshly reprimanded.

However, among Uzbekistan's artist economy the feeling is one of genuine optimism for what the future holds, and censorship appears to have fallen out of conversation entirely. This was particularly palpable at the Uzbekistan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, where five young women from this year's cohort of the Bukhara Biennale's nascent curatorial school worked with Uzbek, Japanese and Chinese artists to stage a moving exhibition on the Aral Sea – a body of water nearly decimated by Soviet-era engineering. That five emerging curators are now bringing this wound to one of the world’s most prominent cultural stages speaks to something larger: a generation ready to engage the international artworld with their own histories.

Nguyen Phuong Linh, Qi, 2026 (installation view, The Aural Sea, Uzbekistan National Pavilion, 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, 2026). Photo: Gerda Studio. Courtesy the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation.

“Year by year, I feel the environment here becoming more open and intellectually free,” says Uzbek artist Zi Kakhramonova, whose interactive sea salt pit is a focal point of the pavilion. “Exhibitions like Vyacheslav Akhunov’s are a testament to that shift.” She believes the next vital step is the involvement of private enterprise. “The emergence of private conceptual galleries and independent museums will be the catalyst for a truly sustainable and diverse art ecosystem.”

Uzbek diaspora artist Aziza Kadyri, who represented Uzbekistan at the Venice Biennale in 2024, is equally enthused by the burgeoning contemporary art scene in the country. “There are younger artists, curators and craftspeople creating serious and often experimental work, much of it outside institutional structures,” she tells The Art Journal. “What the scene really needs now is continuous, uninterrupted support: stronger art education, more regional opportunities, sustained and accessible funding, infrastructure that doesn’t only switch on around international moments.”

Sara Raza shares Kadyri’s ambitions for art education, and with approximately 40 percent of Uzbekistan’s population under the age of thirty-five, there is clearly an urgency. “Many young Uzbek artists are still working within modernist traditions inherited from the Soviet period,” she says. “I think that has something to do with the traditional methodology of teaching which doesn’t include any critical or curatorial practices. It needs to improve if the art scene is to continue growing. Perhaps it is also that young people don’t understand that art can be a viable career.”

Akhunov's Instruments of the Mind is a reminder that structure persists, even as its meaning shifts. Where the ribbon is still being cut in Uzbekistan, it is no longer only to mark completion, but to signal its arrival into a global cultural discourse. There is still work to be done, particularly in resisting an authoritarian relapse under the guise of cultural diplomacy, but as Akhunov says, “Now is the most important time in Uzbekistan’s history”, and the institutions being built today will determine whether that history is remembered as a genuine evolution, or merely an interlude.