Travel

Bukhara’s first art biennial has turned the beguiling UNESCO-listed city in south-eastern Uzbekistan into a cultural hub. By Corinna Hente.

Bukhara’s first art biennial honours the near-forgotten past

The installation Longing (2025) – 2300 metres of silk/cotton ikat weaving.

Credit: Corinna Hente

Surrounded by a sea of turquoise tiles, in a country far from home, the young Russian poet introduces herself and her mission: to heal her soul.

One part of her strategy is to eat plov, the beloved stew with rice that is the national dish of Uzbekistan. The rest is to share her work in this glowing, comforting room.

The poet was an accidental extra in Bukhara’s first art biennial, but her pitch was perfect: the event’s official theme is Recipes for Broken Hearts. Across 200 exhibits from 39 countries, artists brought stories of loss, of reimagination, of finding new paths to healing.

“I wondered [what] the world could feel like if we all took our talents … to try to heal the people around us by creating things that did not exist before,” says Diana Campbell, the biennial’s artistic director.

The event itself brought a kind of repair. Millions of dollars were poured into the city: 35,000 square metres of the historic centre were restored and cleaned up, including several historic inns, known as caravanserai.

It’s another step in President Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s aggressive courting of international tourists for this UNESCO-listed city – more than 2000 years old and a major trading centre on the Silk Road – and for the country as a whole.

Bukhara was always a Central Asian crossroads, and it has suffered major devastation more than once. Genghis Khan destroyed most of it in 1220. It re-emerged as the capital of Turkestan, and in the 16th and 17th centuries was one of the most important trading hubs on the Silk Road and a major centre of Islamic study.

In 1920, Bukhara’s last emir, not much loved by locals, fled from a Red Army takeover that included bombing the city. Many of its 200 or so madrasahs were destroyed or repurposed. What survived of its fabulous past is now being protected and restored, with UNESCO’s help.

Though about 90 per cent of the city’s 300,000 inhabitants today are Muslim, the Soviet presence lingers, now as the largest bloc of tourists and a universally spoken language. Uzbeks are clear that the Soviets never took away what was most important to them – warmth, hospitality, faith.

The biennial reflects this inner integrity. The installation Salt Carried by the Wind (2024–25), by Indian artist Subodh Gupta, with ceramics by renowned Uzbek artist Bakhtiyor Nazirov, is a standalone house, its exterior smothered in drably functional Soviet enamel dishes. Inside, covering every surface, is a profusion of the colourful, intricately decorated ceramic wares for which the area is known. The joy within highlights the lack of it outside.

Another theme is the loss underlying the force with which Bukhara is moving into the future. The biennial aims to honour what is in danger of being forgotten or lost.

The installation Longing (2025) – 2300 metres of silk/cotton ikat weaving by the collective Hylozoic/Desires in collaboration with local ninth-generation ikat master Rasuljon Mirzaahmedov – focuses squarely on water scarcity. It is the biggest environmental issue facing the country, as its western stretches are largely desert, with little rainfall and brutally hot summers. Repeating lengths of fabric stretch and fold above a narrow, limestone canal that now carries just a trickle of water. The weaving depicts the outlines of the rapidly diminishing Aral Sea, the area’s most important water source and now a tiny and very salty fraction of what it used to be.

The turquoise space of Blue Room (2024-25), created by Abdulvahid Bukhoriy in collaboration with Jurabek Siddikov, has been transformed into a contemporary shrine. The artist says it draws on ancient healing rituals and provides “spiritual and ecological restoration”.

“You should make a wish here,” says our guide, Naimjon, at the memorial complex of Khoja Bakhouddin Naqshbandi, founder of the Sufi order that bears his name. It’s one of the holiest of Muslim sites, he says.

“For many people, their wish comes true.”

It’s a peaceful spot. A devotee sits in an open courtyard, reading quietly from the Quran. People stop to listen. The aim is to look into your own soul and be as good as you can be, Naimjon says. To be humble. “Our Islam is tolerant.”

The nearby madrasahs and mosques have domes designed to carry voices across the room, and the same is true of the arched ceilings in the caravanserai. In one darkened, tucked-away corner, a woman sings, joyously improvising to a video of dancers. People stop to watch and listen, accepting the vocal extra as part of the beauty.

Bukhara easily beguiles. Step into the street and you’re in an ancient bustling city, full of traders and travellers, surrounded by high sand-coloured limestone walls that could almost be dunes.

Tourism is still relatively new and Uzbeks are quick to tell you they like visitors and are very happy to welcome you. Decades of almost-closed borders ended after the president came to power in 2016 and freed up visas and accommodation rules, allowing a boom in small-scale tourism enterprises.

Bukhara is a key city in that plan, but as fast as new accommodation options are being built or adapted, it still can’t keep up with exploding demand.

When we were about to take the train here from Khiva, a local told us he’d just come back and “every room is full”. It’s not Florence or Barcelona full, though. There’s still plenty of room to walk without being jostled or harassed.

Bukhara’s big appeal is its fabulous historic centre, described by UNESCO as the most complete example of a medieval city in Central Asia. It’s still a living city, too, poised between the western desert town of Khiva – where all but a few locals have been displaced in favour of tourists – and the more famous Samarkand, where jaw-dropping historic sites are more widely scattered.

We walk through a stone arch into one of Bukhara’s fabled trading domes and are enveloped by the swirl of a dozen or more languages amid the ceramics, silk carpets, traditional wraps and jackets. There are lengths of colourful ikat fabric, tiles, jewellery, gold, head coverings, scarves.

The touts call and cajole, flatter and appeal, trying their best to get your attention, but – and this is the big surprise – they will take “no” for an answer. It’s something of a shock after the next-level harassment that accompanies shopping in, say, Istanbul’s tourist centres.

You are, of course, still expected to haggle. There’s always a “discount” for a good customer. There’s also often a small gift, perhaps something to be shared.

When I buy a gorgeous tile from one tiny shop, the seller smiles and offers what looks like a weathered stone. It is a small dried apricot – the pip still inside, the fruit dried to almost nothing by the scorching sun. He found them that morning, forgotten under a tree, he tells us, and he thought they were good. I discover it is delicious, and he passes over a handful with an enormous smile.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 25, 2025 as "A balm for the soul".

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