Bukhara Biennial 2025: A Cultural Convergence of Art, Craft and Healing
Set beneath open skies and within centuries-old mosques and madrasas, the Bukhara Biennial asks something most art events never dare: what if the place itself is the argument?
The lands we now call Uzbekistan have always been a melting pot where East and West met in cultural profusion. Long before the Silk Road was a term, craftspeople were sharing ideas and techniques across civilisations. That exchange never really stopped.
The Bukhara Biennial launched in 2025 with its inaugural edition, Recipes for Broken Hearts, and returns for its second edition in Autumn 2027. It is, quite simply, one of the most exciting art events on the global calendar not because of its roster, though that is exceptional, but because of what it is doing with place. Bukhara is a UNESCO World Heritage city, a crucial node on the ancient Silk Roads, a place where Islamic architecture, Zoroastrian motif and Hellenic line have been in conversation for two millennia. The biennial does not use this as backdrop. It uses it as argument.
Contemporary art enters into dialogue with living heritage. Installations unfold within madrasas and mosques. The ancient and the present are not in tension here they are genuinely speaking to each other. When was the last time you could say that about an art biennial?
"Recipes for Broken Hearts has been about so much more than making artworks or making an exhibition; it is an attempt to heal from preconditioned painful and often outdated ways that we were told to think about art in hierarchical terms."
Diana Campbell · Artistic Director, Bukhara Biennial
The biennial is directed by Diana Campbell, whose track record across more than 70 countries and as Artistic Director of the Dhaka Art Summit has made her one of the most capable architects of exactly this kind of cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural platform. The architecture is in the hands of Wael Al Awar, co-founder of waiwai, who won the Golden Lion for his curation of the UAE National Pavilion at Venice 2021. The commissioner is Gayane Umerova, Chairperson of the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation, who also serves as Head of Creative Economy and Tourism in the Administration of the President of Uzbekistan and Chairperson of the 25th session of the UNESCO General Assembly. These are people who understand that a biennial is not just an exhibition. It is a statement about a country's relationship to the world.
London-based Aziza Kadyri represented Uzbekistan at the last Venice Biennale.
Working with embroiderer Yulduz Mukhiddinova, she created an installation based on the deconstructed form of a cotton gin, using traditional Uzbek suzani embroidery to illustrate scenes from a diary her grandfather kept during a 1969 research trip to study cotton refining in the American South. History, labour, memory, craft and the global entanglement of a single material all present in one work. This is what the Bukhara Biennial makes possible.
Food artist Laila Gohar whose practice sits at the intersection of art and gastronomy, drawing on her Egyptian heritage to create edible sculptures that play with time, memory and communal ritual worked with architect Ilkhom Shoyimkulov to construct a crystalline pavilion out of navat, sticks of rock sugar traditionally made with grape syrup and served with tea. The material is the meaning: something sweet, something ancient, something that dissolves. Her participation aligns seamlessly with the biennial's emphasis on time as a critical ingredient, for cooking and for healing alike.
For more on food as artistic practice, read our essay: Food Art Is Not a Trend. It Is the Oldest Argument in Art History.
The collaboration between Uzbek artisans and international artists is not decorative here it is structural. The biennial is built around the idea that craft and fine art are not in hierarchy. That suzani embroidery and a Turner Prize shortlistee are in the same conversation, the same courtyard, the same light. That the process of making whether it takes two hours or two thousand years of accumulated technique is as important as the object that results.
The second edition returns in Autumn 2027. It will be worth being there.
Antakly Projects has been in conversation with artists and creatives from around the world since 2003. Explore the full archive at ninunina.com. Follow us on @antakly.projects ✦ Stay curious.
Stay curious,
Leila Antakly
Image courtesy: ACDF, Rafal Sliwa
