How does one put a broken heart back together? The inaugural Bukhara Biennial in Uzbekistan posed this question to two hundred Uzbekistani and international artists, resulting in seventy new commissions installed in the heart of the old Silk Road city. Here, in the birthplace of Avicenna (also known as Abu Ali ibn Sīna), author of the eleventh-century The Book of Healing, contemporary art stepped into the role of healer for three months. While engaging with the “therapeutic turn” in contemporary art, the event’s most compelling offerings functioned as sites of relational aesthetics, in the sense advocated by Nicolas Bourriaud, proposing that healing is a collaborative, socially enacted process. Participatory and collaborative in spirit, this biennale was envisioned by its curator, Diana Campbell, as a space where practitioners from “the visual arts, craft, culinary arts, sound, design, and fashion, as well as visitors,” could come together to create a “collection of heart-mending recipes.” 1 Occupying a restored caravansary, a madrasa, and public squares and walkways in the city center, the biennale embedded art and curing into the fabric of community and everyday life.For the most literal response to the theme, viewers needed to look no further than the work of digital collage artist Oyjon Khayrullaeva. In collaboration with mosaic masters Raxmon Toirov and Rauf Taxirov, Khayrullaeva quite literally put a heart back together through tilework. In Eight Lives (2024–25), the artist rendered six human organs in mosaic and embedded them at various sites across the biennale, drawing on traditional girih techniques—the geometric lattices and Kufic scripts that have long adorned Bukhara’s madrasas and mosques. Khayrullaeva’s color choices are also in line with the traditional color book: the heart’s navy vessels outline turquoise chambers, and their cross sections are patterned like white flowers. Whole again, a heart she stitched back together rested in the restored caravansary, its glaze glowing with the patience of the labor that made it.Some sorrows, however, require mending what cannot be seen. For these, there was Pakui Hardware’s Black Bile (2024–25), a form of on-site therapy. Two installations of stainless-steel tubing and ear-like ceramic organs occupied opposite ends of the biennale grounds. Visitors could whisper their sorrows into one and hear them coming out two days later from the other. Rest assured, a sound-blurring filter transformed what was confessed; the biennale site was as safe a space as your therapist’s couch.Nearby, Zi Kakhramonova’s A Corner for Everyone (2024–25) sought remedy in the memory of a carefree time. Filling an abandoned pit of the caravansary with adult-sized construction toys, Kakhramonova’s work invited visitors to descend into an adult playground to build temporary shelters of innocence and comfort. Here, collaboration extended beyond the “artist + local artisan” formula to include the audience as co-creators, with each makeshift construction serving as an approximation of a childhood home as it was remembered.Photography and video were prevalent throughout the biennale. Also working in tile, the documentary photographer Behzod Boltaev and ceramic artist Dilnoza Karimova presented Healing (2024–25), in which photographic images of ordinary care captured on Bukhara’s streets were transferred onto nine ceramic panels. In one, an old man kisses a pigeon; in another, a bowl of plov, Central Asia’s signature dish of rice cooked in broth, is brought to a weary worker. Installed along the outer walls of the caravansary at the heart of the old town, the project enlarged these moments of quiet kindness while maintaining their authentic context. The project suggested that the city and biennale sites themselves are the grounds where the heart heals, and that the true recipe lies within the everyday and the community.In the effort to mend a heart, laughter perhaps offers the readiest remedy. Denis Davydov, working with Bahrom Gulov and Anvar Gulov, teleported Nasreddin Hodja, the beloved folklore trickster of the Muslim world, to our consumer age through CGI animation. In Khoja Returns, Though He Never Left (2024–25), a roomful of miniature Nasreddin statues gathered around a gigantic screen, on which a cartoon version of the trickster, his shopping bag–laden donkey in tow, wandered through an alley where women in jewel-toned clothing danced on the roofs above. Has the once-upright folklore hero embraced retail therapy? A soundtrack humming luxury brand names in the background accentuated this possibility, but no joy can be discerned on his poker face. For the visitor, amusement was the first reaction to this absurd hodgepodge, before giving way to reflections on the nature of materialistic joy. That response itself then became the subject of a new reflection: does this shared amusement, in the spirit of Claire Bishop’s critiques of humor, smooth over the work’s potential critical dimension?A deeper kind of pondering was evoked by Aziza Shadenova and Andrey Arakelyan’s video collage, Echo of the Self: The Soul in Motion, the Body Forgotten (2024–25). Inspired by Avicenna’s Floating Man thought experiment—the idea of a person suspended in air, stripped of all sensory input, yet still aware of their own existence—the video reinterprets the philosopher’s premise that the soul is self-aware beyond the physical body by weaving together fragments of moving images. Played on two parallel screens, the work captures people in in-between states—moments of making, becoming, and twisting assembled through clips, collages, and montages—alongside objects mid-creation. Consciousness, in this representation, is not a static state but something shaped by gesture, labor, and presence. It can be considered a constant negotiation between craft objects and their creator, hovering between weight and weightlessness, between motion and memory.Another old Avicennian prescription, color therapy, found expression through Abdulvahid Bukhoriy’s Blue Room (2024–25). Formerly the prayer hall of a madrasa, the space was covered with handcrafted tiles whose blue glaze derives from plants harvested during the Bukhara Biennial season—the idea being that the room itself now embodied a slow, meditative process. Overhead, a chandelier of brass and copper fish forms (created with coppersmith Jurabek Siddikov) invoked Central Asian healing rituals, where scaled creatures were called forth to absorb human illness. The very space thus became medicine.Outside the blue room, the body’s need for nourishment found expression in Subodh Gupta’s Salt Carried by the Wind (2024–25), a pavilion that stood at the center of the biennale site and that served from time to time as a pop-up restaurant. Its walls, constructed by the artist from two thousand threaded enamel pots on the outside and as many plates by local ceramicist Baxtiyor Nazirov on the inside, had two openings through which visitors could enter and sit on bar stools. On the biennale’s opening days, Gupta himself cooked for and served guests, transforming the mundane into a performance.Beyond personal heartbreak lies collective crisis. Vahap Avşar, together with Bukharian woodcarver Firuz Shamsiyev, answers the decline in bee populations with snow leopard sculptures designed to serve as swarm boxes. In Swarm Works (2024–25), abstract, textured, and suspended high from human interference, these carved animals blended well into the city’s old brick walls, turning art into literal habitat.Below these sanctuaries, the Shahrud Canal threaded through the biennale site, carrying both water and its history as the city’s main water supply. Himali Singh Soin’s ikat tapestries followed its course while documenting another disappearance: the Aral Sea’s slow death due to Soviet water mismanagement. The series of tapestries stretching along the canal features nearly identical patterns repeating the same motif, that of a blue Aral Sea shrinking into toxic ochre and pink, its proximity to water echoing the Sufi poetry that speaks of longing “like the tide.” Healing here was more symbolic than actual, a call for attention alongside the real ecosystem restoration that has already begun.Commissioned by the Art and Culture Development Foundation of the Republic of Uzbekistan—which also funded the Centre for Contemporary Arts Tashkent, scheduled to open fully in March 2026—the first Uzbek biennale is one of several state-backed projects aimed at promoting contemporary art. The governmental push was to burnish Uzbekistan’s image on the world stage, and the route they chose was through collaborative art. Across the biennale’s seventy projects, this commitment to genuine co-creation was unmistakable. None of the projects were realized through the work of a single artist; all works were produced in Uzbekistan through collaborations between international artists and local artisans and coordinated by the Bukhara Biennial. Many artists themselves live between two different locales, their self-introductions punctuated by hyphens. The very process of creation suggests that real healing cannot happen in isolation; mending a broken heart requires collaborative work.And beneath all the remedies was a deeper question: What is the function of art? Familiar accounts suggest confronting power, transcending circumstance, or revealing evils, but the Bukhara Biennial reminds us that art heals. The recommended approach is not solitary introspection but co-creation, rendering both the production and consumption of art a social and relational act. Healing emerges through collaborative making, shared meals, and secrets whispered through steel tubes; it is also found in the pit where childhood homes are reconstructed, or on the streets and art sites filled with local families and tourists. Ultimately, the Bukhara Biennial proposed that the recipe for a broken heart is other people. This stance challenged the individualized self-care that pervades contemporary culture, proposing a model of repair that is inherently collective, even when facilitated by state interests. Perhaps, in the end, the question is no longer how to mend a broken heart, but how can we have more art projects like this to do the mending.
Hantian Zhang (Sun,) studied this question.