The Aural Sea

The Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF) presents The Aural Sea at the Uzbekistan National Pavilion in the Arsenale at the 61st Venice Biennale. Commissioned by Gayane Umerova, Chairperson of ACDF, The Aural Sea explores how mythology can begin to reframe one of the most profound environmental transformations of the modern era, unfolding as a sensory, immersive environment.

The Pavilion is curated by Kamila Mukhitdinova, Sophie Mayuko Arni, Nico Sun, Thái Hà and Aziza Izamova, a collective formed through the first cohort of the Bukhara Biennial Curatorial School—an ACDF initiative commissioned by Gayane Umerova, convened by Diana Campbell, and developed in partnership with Aaron Cezar and Delfina Foundation. Bringing together perspectives from across Central and East Asia, the curators position myths and fiction not as escape, but as a response to ecological crisis, foregrounding imagination as a tool for rethinking reality.

The exhibition features newly commissioned and recent works by Jahongir Bobokulov (Uzbekistan), Zi Kakhramonova (Uzbekistan), Aygul Sarsen (Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan), Zulfiya Spowart (Uzbekistan), Xin Liu (China), A.A.Murakami (UK and Japan), and Nguyen Phuong Linh (Vietnam).

Stretching across northwestern Uzbekistan, the Aral Sea was once one of the world's largest inland lakes, before large-scale diversion of the region's rivers for agricultural irrigation turned it into a desert in the 1960s. Yet for the local population of Karakalpakstan, south of the Sea, the region remains not simply a story of disappearance, but a place where hope and imagination persist, held in memory, story, and everyday life.

The Pavilion takes inspiration from the work of the young Karakalpak author Allyar Darmenov, who began writing about the Aral Sea in 2015, drawing upon realms of mythmaking to imagine possible futures rather than chronicling environmental devastation, embracing fiction as a way to shift perspective and open new ways of seeing.

The Aural Sea forms part of ACDF’s long-term cultural investment in the Aral region, alongside the Aral Culture Summit and the Aral School in Nukus. These initiatives contribute to a ten-year vision by the Government of Uzbekistan to support the region’s social, economic and cultural revitalisation, initiated under the leadership of Shavkat Mirziyoyev, President of the Republic of Uzbekistan, and aligned with national priorities around sustainable development and ecological restoration in the Aral Sea region.

Across installation, sculpture, painting, textile, sound, and immersive environments, each artist engages with the Aral Sea not as a singular historic event but as a place of renewal and creativity, approaching it as a living, evolving entity.

In her installation Qi, Nguyen Phuong Linh tunes into the flows of energy that circulate around the seabed, the remnant waters, and the atmosphere. Composed of three works, each with motorized components that rise and fall like lungs, or contract like a heart, Qi imagines the landscape as a body whose organs are evolving, in real time, to live in a changing Aral. 

Xin Liu’s The Permanent and the Insatiable: Born to Sea (2026) are made from hand woven post-consumer plastic and submerged in tanks containing an enzymatic solution. Activated by heat, the reaction gradually breaks down the material over the course of the biennale. 

Aygul Sarsen grew up a few hundred kilometres from the former Aral shoreline. Never having seen the water herself, Sarsen turns to portraiture to imagine the Aral as a feminine deity. 

 Zulfiya Spowart’s Beshik (The Cradle) (2026) is a sculptural meditation on motherhood, fragility, and adaptation centred on the traditional Central Asian cradle. The installation uses wood, textiles, sound and movement to reflect on the cradle as a “first home,” where tenderness and instability coexist, mirroring the disorientation and redirection caused by the disappearance of the Aral Sea.

Turning to the lost and changing marine life of the Aral Sea, Zi Kakhramonova’s Archive of Lost Forms (2026) is a salt-based participatory installation where viewers physically recreate lost marine life through touch and play. Nearby, A.A.Murakami’s The Sun Sets in a Shell (2026), produced with the support of Mandarin Knitting Technology and Zegna Baruffa Lane Borgosesia, is a large-scale tapestry, capturing environmental transformation through the coded patterns of the zebra mussels—a species native to the Aral Sea—to explore how nature transforms disorder into pattern. 

Jahongir Bobokulov’s Aura (2025) is a contemplative work that engages the unseen atmospheres of the Aral region—its emotional residue, spiritual presence, and the invisible forces that continue to shape memory and landscape long after physical disappearance. 

Uniting all the artworks is a new myth written by Allayar Darmenov in the exhibition catalogue. Titled The Labyrinth, it tells the story of the Aral Sea through the voices of salt, sun, shells, breath, creatures, and the Aral Goddess herself. 

The Pavilion’s scenography has been developed by GRACE (Ekaterina Golovatyuk, Giacomo Cantoni, Ksenia Bisti) together with emerging architects from the Tashkent Institute of Architecture and Civil Engineering. 

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