TASHKENT POWER PLAY

PIN–UP visited Tashkent at the invitation of the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation.

Arriving at the entrance of the Studio KO-designed CCA Tashkent, the building appears unassuming. A silver-paneled gate hovering ever so slightly off the ground is flanked by two Tsarist-era buildings dating to 1912, rendered in pale-yellow brickwork. To the left of this gate, which opens onto a vast courtyard, a door cuts into what was once the side of the original structure — gestured into the composition with an unnerving plainness. About three meters tall, the black-framed glass door is covered with a film that creates a warping, dichroic effect, causing the entryway to bounce back at you. Now, the complication begins. With a pinky-purple tint, the reflection shows a bloated, skewed, multilayered image of yourself, mangled with the building behind. When you learn that the site, now home to Uzbekistan’s first permanent center for contemporary art, was formerly a diesel station, the resemblance to the iridescent film of oil on water acquires a particular humor. As the building unravels, you see that it’s these architectural poetics, drawn between past and present, material and use, institution and location, that define the scheme. “Sometimes poetry comes from what happens within the architecture — the traces in the wall, the traces of history,” explains Olivier Marty, co-founder of the Paris-based Studio KO (with Karl Fournier). “When we discovered the place, it was being used by another foundation as a Bohemian underground art venue. The walls had these scars and [records of] destruction. The windows had these plastic UV filters, but it was beautiful. It had this monumentality. It had a soul — something strong. If you look closely, we have kept some of those traces. It’s very subtle, but there’s a musicality to that.”

Located in the center of the old city, CCA Tashkent was conceived in 2017, alongside the formation of the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF). Chaired by Gayane Umerova, who also heads the Department of Creative Economy and Tourism in Uzbekistan’s presidential administration, the foundation aims to bring the former Soviet republic into a global art conversation still largely centered on the West, foregrounding Uzbekistan’s own artistic and cultural heritage. From the Bukhara Biennial, whose inaugural edition last fall reportedly saw 1.8 million visitors traverse its 3.5-hectare site over ten weeks (read Andrew Pasquier’s review here), to Uzbekistan’s participation in the Venice Art and Architecture Biennales since 2021, the country is increasingly establishing itself — from Bukhara to Tashkent to Samarkand — as a cultural destination with a growing presence on the international art circuit.

But ACDF isn’t just committed to drawing global attention, investors, or audiences. It is also, and seemingly with just as much urgency, looking to carve out space right here on the ground for artists, designers, and all kinds of creative practitioners, local and foreign. As ACDF advisor Cyril Zammit tells it, “what Gayane wants to do is build capacity.” Sure, he’s referring to the community-engaging initiatives the foundation is developing to open doors to the countless roles available within the art world beyond just “curator.” “Once a month, we’ll have a professional [visit the CCA to cover] specific topics within the art world, for example IP and law,” he continues. “It’s important that people are aware and open to the multiplicity of jobs in the museum and art world. You can be a lawyer, a logistics manager, even a collector.” But with architecture playing such an important role in this new era of Uzbek cultural revitalization, “capacity-building” takes on an appropriately architectural double meaning.

Uzbekistan, like the rest of Central Asia, has a rich and storied architectural heritage, with influences spanning from the pre-Islamic and Islamic to the Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet. As part of ACDF’s program, this legacy is both preserved — with long-term initiatives such as Tashkent Modernism (which saw ten Tashkent modernist buildings added to the UNESCO World Heritage List earlier this year) — and built upon through the restoration of countless culturally important sites across the region, often tied to wider artist-focused initiatives. In 2027, the Jadids’ Legacy Museum, as reimagined by Lina Ghotmeh, is set to open to the public. A year later, it’ll be followed by the new National Museum of Uzbekistan by Modernist heavyweight Tadao Ando. To go along with the CCA’s 2025 residency program, Studio KO took over another pre-existing site in Tashkent’s Namuna mahalla: a 19th-century madrasah and mosque complex, adapting it for the CCA’s artist residency program. With UNESCO recognition, conservation, and tourism all in play, ACDF’s focus on architecture is clearly as economically strategic as it is cultural.

Over a lunch of plov, roasted baby chickens, fresh tomato salads, and crispy aubergine, ACDF chairperson Gayane Umerova tells me that architecture was her passion from a very young age and what she dreamed of studying. Concerned that she might not withstand the intense crits of design school, her father encouraged her to pursue business instead. Still, as demonstrated by the vim with which Olivier Marty recounts how she fought for the materialization of every single idea Studio KO put forth, the love persists and gives another dimension to ACDF’s initiatives. “Even us [as a studio] were a bit surprised that we did all of this,” Marty laughs. “But it’s because of Gayane’s support. When you have it and you push for iron window frames instead of aluminum, and they cost triple the price, the budget can double.”

Now that the CCA has opened its doors, international visitors like me can walk among these material compositions, produced at scale with teams from Dubai (for the brown-speckled terrazzo), Turkey (for the zinc roofs), and France. But its public programming is designed for the predominantly young local population (“everyone is in their twenties” is a half-joke I hear numerous times across my four days in town). The CCA caters to kids and students with a large workshop, a 90-seat auditorium, and a specialist research library focused on art, visual cultures, and critical theory.

Leading the Centre’s programming is its chief curator, Dr. Sara Raza, an art historian, scholar, and author of Punk Orientalism: The Art of Rebellion (2022). With the inaugural show, Hikmah — meaning “wisdom” in Uzbek — Raza has brought together works by ten artists, including Ukrainian-Tunisian Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Jamaican American Nari Ward, Saudi Muhannad Shono, and Palestinian Tarik Kiswanson. Drawing on Central Asian Sufi traditions, the exhibition explores how wisdom can be expressed through materials, craftsmanship, and the act of making. Hikmah includes both newly commissioned and pre-existing works, many presented as monumental, attention-grabbing installations that come together to, as Raza says, “dissolve the hierarchy between craft and fine art.” It’s a show Raza describes as “decisively architectural” — both a presentation and a method for thinking through exhibition-making in the context of CCA Tashkent.

When Gayane invited Raza to curate and lead the space, her starting point was the main exhibition hall, housed in the other Tsarist-era building you encounter at the entrance, which she likens to Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. “I started thinking from this space and expanding, [asking,] ‘What are the traditional spaces to showcase work? What are the unorthodox ways?’” The answer was outside, downstairs, in excavated underground window niches, and on pilasters in between aperture openings. Because though Uzbekistan’s architectural heritage is great and vast, it is also finding itself anew. When we visit the Centre the day before its planned opening, they’re still figuring out the hanging system for some of the works.