STATECRAFT

“It’s all about the plov.” The quasi-mantra is still ringing in my head months after fighting a crowd of kids — arms outstretched, bowls in hand — for a spoonful of rice in the ancient Uzbek city of Bukhara. Dubbed the Rice Cultures Feast, the scene was the capstone public program for the ten-week run of the Bukhara Biennial, one of the crowning jewels of the muti-pronged soft power effort by the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF) led by Gayane Umerova. From Uzbekistan’s plov to Senegal’s ceebu yapp to Brazil’s arroz e feijão (and more), the street festival pointed to shared rice obsessions that link the world through a culinary language of generosity. A concurrent locally-focused plov competition – reminiscent of the historic rice cook-offs staged by the emirs of Bukhara – pitted the recipes of rival Uzbek chefs. Everyone felt like a winner.

Instigating a feeding frenzy in a city square is not the typical send-off for a biennial art set, and this mix of inclusivity and chaos encapsulated the charmingly human approach of the state-backed project. If we are to believe official statistics, 1.8 million people visited the Biennial, or at least crisscrossed its free-to-all urban zone stretching between six disused historic sites in the core of the Silk Road city. Even with Uzbekistan’s geopolitical ambitions in the air, charges of “art washing” would hold more water if the main audience and benefactors of the Bukhara Biennial were foreign collectors, editors, and other culture vultures. Instead, the local kids ruled the day.

This embedded focus was, to a large degree, nurtured by chief curator Diana Campbell. During a finissage-week tour of the exhibition, she explained, “my passion as a curator has always been introducing contemporary art to audiences who didn’t yet know it was for them.” From the extraordinary mix of attendees on the days I visited — elderly couples in bright-colored traditional garb, squads of teenagers in sportswear, Russian influencer types, and art school students — she succeeded. In fact, the blaring state branding exercise of the Bukhara Biennal was somehow one of the most radical curatorial projects of 2025. Credit is due to Campbell’s context-sensitive leadership and the surprising willingness of the state nomenklatura to fund (and largely not censor) the experiment. Minus a few heavy hitters — such as Antony Gormley, Tarek Atoui, and Wael Shawky — a glance at the artist list reveals the commitment to local impact over international glitz. The 30-odd international artists were each paired with one of “Uzbekistan’s most masterful craftspeople” — i.e. local ceramicists, carpet weavers, chefs, glass blowers, miniature painters, et cetera. While this gesture could easily become buzzwordy lip service, the collaborative fruits were ripe. And, quite shockingly, everyone was paid the same flat fee. As Campbell’s curatorial statement puts it, the approach seeks to “heal unjust divisions between how we see fine and applied arts and how we talk about collaboration.”

Back in Bukhara, Lebanese architect Wael Al Awar was tasked with identifying disused buildings for the Biennial and transforming part of the historic center of Bukhara into a slightly Disney-esque, pedestrianized paradise. The incredible result for the biennial: access to three courtyard-oriented madrassas, a roof-collapsed mosque, and the caravanserais, or medieval inns for merchants and their animals. While strict adherence to perseveration principles was of little concern to slap-and-dash reconstruction of Uzbekistan’s other ancient city, Samarkand, by the Soviets, Uzbek authorities are now bound to follow the UNESCO statutes they themselves trumpet. (In a diplomatic coup, the 2025 UNESCO assembly was held in Samarkand — the first outside of Paris in 40 years). Therefore, beyond addressing issues like missing grout and loose bricks, the exhibition spaces themselves are bare-bones and the architectural interventions minimal. Yet, it’s hard not to wonder how the government could brazenly pave over half of the neighborhood in a Potemkin village-esque makeover, but be prevented from laying a nail in the interiors. Sources inside the curatorial team admitted that while the Biennial hung within Al Awar’s master plan, last minute details that gave the biennial spatial character — such as bright gumdrop-esque kiosks at the entrance — should be credited to Ariel André’s Paris-based studio GOLEM, plus the overworked biennial production staff. While UNESCO designations generally hinder architectural “innovation,” the restrictions here did help preserve a DIY feeling to the affair — the millennium of dust and dank air inside some of the half-ruined sites a fitting complement to the curatorial narrative.

A short walk outside the Biennial zone, through streets still ignored by the state’s urbanist largess, a sequestered act of historical adaptation by Lina Gotmeh, the Jadids’ Legacy Museum, encapsulates Uzbekistan’s historical rebalancing act. Due to open in 2027, the cloistered house museum will be dedicated to Jadidism, a late-19th century to early-20th century reformist movement that sought to modernize Central Asian society through education. As the movement grew and engendered Turkic nationalism, it threatened Russian and then Soviet domination of the region and was quashed. Now, as Uzbekistan’s leadership positions the country as an independent middle power, this long-buried history gets a new built expression through the Gotmeh-led renovation project.

But first — as construction continues apace on this museum, and across the country on 1,001 cultural projects — let’s get back to the plov. As Campbell noted many times, the title of the inaugural Biennial, “Recipes for Broken Hearts,” is a direct nod to philosopher Ibn Sina who, according to legend, created Uzbekistan’s national dish as a balm for a lovelorn Bukharan prince. Sitting on a newly-installed bench, observing the sensory overload of the Rice Cultures Feast, the local-first commitment of ACDF’s approach to reviving Uzbek heritage appears like an inspired balm against the copy-and-paste global biennial circuit and its glossy architectural corollaries.