This is a continuation of Laboratories of Friendship, Part 1: New Decolonial Culture Buildings Beyond the Russian Neo-Empire.
Map vs. Territory
From Dnipro, I took the nineteen-hour sleeper train to Warsaw. My compartment companions and I were amused to discover that we were all taking the same LOT flight to Tashkent the next day. They were cosmetic surgeons from Dnipro on their way to an international hair restoration congress. I was on my way to the opening of the Centre of Contemporary Arts Tashkent (CCA). What were the chances? Surely, we are the only three people heading from Dnipro to Uzbekistan that day, and we’re all in the same compartment, we thought. On board the flight, however, it turned out that there were quite a few Ukrainians among us, most of them en route to Uzbekistan and elsewhere in Central Asia for business. Most of the Polish and remaining European passengers appeared to be holidaymakers. The greatest share of the passengers were migrant workers from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, heading home.
We landed in Tashkent at 3 am. On arrival, I was surprised and relieved to discover that the Ukrainian taxi app Uklon was active and popular in the city, so I would not have to rely on Yandex, a Russian tech giant ubiquitous in most ex-Soviet countries, particularly following its acquisition of regional Uber franchises, to get around. (Yandex is also notoriously eager to share its customers’ user data with Russian security services.)1 My Uklon app was tied to my Ukrainian SIM card, and each of the cab drivers I rode with in Tashkent expressed, without prompting and with apparent sincerity, their concern for Ukraine, as well as their anger and disdain towards Russia.
Later that evening, I arrived at the CCA, located a few blocks to the southeast of Amir Temur Square—today the greenest of the main public squares in downtown Tashkent, laid down as the center of the Russian imperial “New City” adjacent to the pre-existing settlement. CCA is housed in a former tram depot and diesel station; a crucial node in the city’s early-twentieth-century electricity and transport network. Completed in 1912, the depot is a capacious structure designed by Wilhelm Geinteselman (Heinzelmann), a Ukrainian-Jewish-German architect born in Odesa in 1851 who spent the greater part of his life working in Tashkent, in the service of the Russian Empire. Tashkent, a major trading center and fortress of the Khoqand Khanate, was conquered by Russia in a brutal, renegade 1865 assault led by Mikhail Chernyaev. The following year, the city became the capital of the new Russian imperial province of Turkestan.
Geinteselman moved to Tashkent on the coattails of conquest, rising to the rank of chief architect of the city by 1888. He was, as many other imperial builders of the time, a pragmatic and versatile architect, working across multiple styles: from standard-issue imperial neoclassical, to neo-Byzantine (the Orthodox Cathedral of the Sacred Transfiguration), quasi-Moorish, Gothic revival, and art nouveau, and hybrids of the latter two (the Palace of the exiled Grand Duke Nikolai Konstantinovich Romanov Tashkent).2 The depot building is eclectic, merging a functional, industrial scale with Gothic revival accoutrements. Done in flat sandstone brick (known in Tashkent as “Nikolai brick”), its texture nods beyond the Russian imperial Tashkent in which it lies to the mahallas (traditional self-governing neighborhoods) of the Islamic old city.
The foundation stories of CCA Tashkent and the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture could not be at further remove in terms of their political geometry. The renovation and reconstruction of CCA Tashkent was carried out on the initiative of the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF), a big-bucks operation under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture of Uzbekistan (CCA Tashkent, like Warsaw’s MSN, is therefore state-owned). The political patron of ACDF is politician and economist Saida Mirziyoyeva, who is the daughter of Shavkat Mirziyoyev, the president of Uzbekistan, and, since June 2025, the official head of her father’s Presidential Administration. The ACDF’s chairperson is Saida’s longtime professional acquaintance, curator, and diplomat Gayane Umerova, who is also a senior functionary in the Presidential Administration.
CCA Tashkent had an official opening ceremony planned for September 2025, when it was initially due to be completed, but is now postponed till March 2026. When the center does open, it will do so with an exhibition curated by artistic director, British-Iranian Sara Raza titled “Hikmah” (the Uzbek word for “wisdom”), featuring the work of global majority, Uzbek, and Karakalpak artists devoted, according to the press materials, to the somewhat vague theme of “wisdom across cultures and materials.”3 The design for the transformation of the derelict depot into the CCA was done by the French Studio KO, who have a close relationship with ACDF, having represented Uzbekistan at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. Studio KO stripped the tram depot to its bare brick basics, adding a curved concrete workshop and lobby space.
In lieu of the postponed opening ceremony, the ACDF organized a pre-reception in the not-quite-completed CCA complex. The inner courtyard remained bare, cemented over, and devoid of vegetation. The gallery spaces were not yet on show, and the main hall at the center of the structure, the Diesel Room, was laid out for a gala dinner. Mirziyoyeva, Umerova, and multiple functionaries and diplomats were in attendance, alongside assembled journalists and guests. A fusion dinner of moshkichiri (Uzbek meat and mung bean stew) and, for some reason, Pavlova (a meringue and fruit dessert named after the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova) was served. As we ate, a kilt-wearing Scottish DJ, GALLiVANTER, delivered a high-decibel soundtrack fusing, inexplicably, Indian pop music and rather martial-sounding Scottish Highland marching tunes.
Studio KO also oversaw the reconstruction of the CCA’s artist residency complex in the Namuna mahalla in Olmazar district, located in the northwest of Tashkent, just beyond the boundaries of the imperial New City. The Namuna residencies are housed in a nineteenth-century former madrasa, which was converted into a carpentry workshop during the Soviet years. The renovation project, carried out under the twin auspices of ACDF and the Aga Khan Trust, placed emphasis on traditional craftsmanship, local materials, and careful restoration of details, such as intricate sandstone brickwork and the wood lattice screens set into the pointed arches marking the entrance to each of the madrasa students’ cells (now converted into living quarters for the artists and scholars in residence). A daytime reception was held by the ACDF for our press junket and other guests at the residencies in the burning heat of the Tashkent afternoon. Roasting in the courtyard, we were saved from sunstroke by spots of shade beneath newly-planted poplar trees. The space was serene and gentle, and stood in stark contrast to the vast ramshackle void immediately beyond the residency complex’s perimeter, in which the minibuses ferrying our junket were parked.
On the other side of the void rose a new structure: an enormous rectangular concrete box camouflaged by marble and glazed tiling, fronted by a grandiose iwan portal mimicking the style of the fifteenth-century Timurid renaissance madrasas of Samarkand and with a vast blue-tiled dome rising above. The building, designed by the Uzbek architect Abdukahar Turdiev (who is also responsible for Europe’s largest mosque, a gargantuan Kadyrov-benefacted concrete neo-Timurid pile completed in 2019 in Shali, Chechnya) houses the Center for Islamic Civilization Center (CIsC), an institution established in 2017 on the initiative of President Mirziyoyev and bankrolled in its entirety by Uzbekistan-born (and internationally-sanctioned) Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov. The CIsC is, according to its own self-description, integrated with the sixteenth- to nineteenth-century Hazrat Imam religious complex at the core of the Olmazar district, and “represents a considerable commitment to preserving the nation’s Islamic heritage.”4
As we left the residencies and headed for our minibuses, I reached for my phone to double check the name of the vast entity towering menacingly over the mahalla, and to take a screenshot of the location for future reference. I opened Google Maps and was thrown off balance. The satellite image, dated to February 2025, identified my location correctly at the entrance to the Namuna residencies. According to the image, there should have been a thick cluster of houses positioned between the residencies and the CIsC. Yet there was nothing in front of me but a sandy void that was in the process of being paved over, and a few cars parked here and there. This was the first of several “the map is not the territory” moments I experienced in Uzbekistan, which is in the midst of a grandiose campaign of urban “renewal” and “modernization”—one of whose consequences is the demolition of the last surviving fragments of the mahalla quarters in Uzbekistani cities, not only in Tashkent but also in Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva, and beyond. Those bits of the mahallas that will survive the purge are slated to be transformed into touristified fantasies of the “Central Asian city,” with the demolished quarters given over to new structures, be they commercial developments or spiritual-ideological complexes, including sprawling new mosques, mausoleums, and museums.
The Olmazar void in which I stood, staring at my phone and then again at the expanse and portal rising beyond, was excised out of the mahalla, it would seem, with the express purpose of creating a grand plaza linking the Namuna residencies to the CIsC. Does this mean that the ACDF, and by extension CCA Tashkent, is responsible for these wounds cut into the fabric of the city? Not so, some of my Tashkent interlocutors reassured me. In fact, they claimed, the foundation lobbies as hard as it can for the conservation of as much heritage as is possible in Uzbekistan, and for its re-use for lofty purposes, such as heritage-focused contemporary art undertakings (instead of Russian oligarch–bankrolled spiritual-ideological regime propaganda complexes). The ACDF’s record in researching, cataloging, and lobbying for the preservation of Tashkent’s Soviet modernist heritage is, it should be noted, far-reaching and ongoing. Even if it constitutes a kind of internal opposition within the Uzbekistani heritage-demolition complex, it is clear, nevertheless, that the ACDF is a powerful actor in both the process of Uzbekistan’s museification, and in the transformation of the fabric and image of Uzbekistan’s cities.
A highlight of my ACDF-curated tour of Tashkent was a visit to the gargantuan modernist-Orientalist People’s Friendship Palace: a 4,000-seat concert and congress venue completed in 1981 on the edge of the former Komsomol (now Alisher Navoi) Park, to the southwest of the imperial New City, and one of the few modernist buildings to be listed by the Uzbek government in 2019, ahead of the ACDF’s heritage conservation, research, and lobbying operations.5
Komsomol Park, situated on the “old city” side of the Ankhor Canal, the traditional dividing line between the Islamic and “European” cities, had been carved out of the Beshagach mahalla in the 1930s in an effort to sow together Tashkent’s neighborhoods, hitherto segregated between settlers and locals. By demolishing the mahalla, socialist planners thought, Friendship between settlers and indigenes could be hastened. Further demolitions and orderings of space proceeded over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in the construction of the palace, whose structure and envelope—including the faux-panjara concrete latticing and faux-muqarnas cornicing lavished upon the facade—was designed by an all-Russian team of Friend-architects from Moscow, and which consolidated the process of “merging” the two cities (which essentially meant demolishing the old and expanding the new). Local craftspeople were brought in to design the decorative friezes and mosaics in the interior of the building.
This mode of collaboration between European (ordinarily Russian) architects and local craftspeople was entirely in line with the hierarchical norms of Soviet Friendship, in which the Russian Friend was prince among equals. But it is also an established facet, as architectural historian Greg Castillo observes, of Western European attempts to appropriate the styles of colonized people for the buildings of empire. “Like the Indo-Saracenic architecture of the British Raj,” Castillo writes (with reference to Stalin-era socialist realism), Soviet attempts to appropriate “national forms” worked according to a “stylistic framework in which masters of indigenous construction were reduced to specialists in the decorative arts working under the supervision of outside ‘experts.’” In effect, Castillo adds, in Soviet Central Asia and British India alike, this form of collaboration “reconstituted vernacular tradition to suit the needs of the Soviet power.”6
As multiple facets of the palace amply demonstrate—from its external and internal appearance, to the apportionment of design tasks along national lines—Stalinist ideologies and practices of Friendship did not disappear with the death of Stalin (and the waning of socialist realist stylistic doctrine which followed). In fact, the Soviet Union continued living and breathing an ossified form of Stalinism until its dying breath (and beyond), all the more pronouncedly so in the Brezhnev-era stagnation period during which the palace was completed. In 2008, however, under the reign of post-Soviet dictator (and former Uzbek Communist Party general secretary) Islam Karimov, Tashkent’s People’s Friendship Palace was re-named Istiklol (Independence) Palace—as was the Friendship Square situated in front of it and the adjoining metro station.
Correspondingly, a late-Soviet infantilist kitsch sculptural composition titled Friendship of the Peoples, dedicated to the Uzbek Shamakhmudov family, who adopted fifteen evacuated children from various European Soviet republics during World War II, erected in 1982 in the center of Friendship Square, was quietly removed from view. Ten years later, however, not even two years after taking power, President Mirziyoyev—in a move widely considered to be a heartstring-tugging populist gesture—decreed that the palace, square, and metro station would be returned to their original name, and that the Shamakhmudov Friendship monument would also be restored to its original site. In Tashkent and Warsaw alike, monumental formations of Friendship have a stubborn tendency to return from deep storage.7
Non-decolonial Healing
The next day, I took the train to Bukhara for the opening of the Bukhara Biennial (the rest of my junket took a chartered flight, but I was a late addition, so made my own arrangements for most of the trip). Uklon did not work in Bukhara, so I paid a taxi driver extra in cash to bypass the Yandex monopoly. The train station is in fact not situated in Bukhara proper, but in the town of Kogon (formerly New Bukhara), which was established in the 1880s as a settlement servicing the Russian-built Trans-Caspian railroad, twelve kilometers away from Bukhara proper. This was the effect, I was told, of the partial autonomy the Emirate of Bukhara enjoyed from the Russian Empire, in contrast to Tashkent and Samarkand, which were incorporated (“voluntarily acceded”) into the empire outright after assaults led by Russian Generals Chernyaev (Tashkent) and von Kaufmann (Samarkand and Khiva). But Bukhara was finally subdued, with hundreds of civilians and soldiers killed and extensive destruction perpetrated against its historical built fabric by Bolshevik forces under the command of Bishkek-born General Mikhail Frunze—therefore enacting a red continuation and consummation of the imperial subjugation undertaken, but not finished, just five decades previously by Tsarist forces.8
It took over forty minutes to reach the historic city. The roads were blocked, the driver said, “for the biennial.” “Will you go visit the biennial with your family,” I asked? “What for? it’s not for Bukharans,” he replied. The whole city is dug up, and they’re turning everything into a “pretty picture” for tourists, he continued. The streets of the old city had been doused clean with jet washers in the days prior to the biennial opening.9
The taxi dropped me off at the Zagaron Toqi (trading dome), which demarcated the entrance to the pedestrianized section of the old city. Guards and metal detectors had been deployed for the duration of the biennial. It was my first time in Bukhara, and indeed in any of the great Silk Road cities. Its glory—a tightly-clumped organism, famously built atop a single limestone stylobate, of madrasas, mosques, minarets, mausolea, hammoms, takis (bazaars), and caravanserais, many dating from the fourteenth- or fifteenth-century Timurid and sixteenth-century Shaybanid empires—was spell-binding for an uninitiated visitor. Perhaps all the more so for its power-washed shininess.
On the biennial’s behest, contemporary artworks—most by artists connected to Uzbekistan or Central Asia, as well many by internationals (although in each case working in collaboration with Uzbekistani artists or craftspeople)—were scattered throughout and around Bukhara’s ancient monuments. The artworks filled up the inner courtyards of (deconsecrated) mosques and inhabited madrassa cells, cheek by jowl. Many of the works were expressive, thoughtful, and impressive in their own right, reflecting on themes of intimacy, technology, femininity, and traumatic heritages. The sum of curatorial labor constituted an awesome feat of research, logistics, and arrangement, which was clearly the product of much sensitivity and determination. ACDF provided extensive resources, for sure, but the conditions under which the artists and curators worked were, it was widely remarked, extremely volatile and subject to administrative whim and caprice. As such, the curatorial team of the biennial, headed by Diana Campbell with Timur Zolotoev, an ethnic Buryat art historian and journalist exiled from Russia since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, deserve praise and recognition for what they achieved and endured.
Nevertheless, as one struggled to make sense of the sheer quantity of work piled together like unruly, shimmering sardines amidst the bricks of the ancient city, I could not help finding the gestalt a little arbitrary and gratuitous. Given the ACDF’s commitment to protecting the Soviet modernist architecture of Tashkent, and that a lot of Bukhara’s own Soviet buildings are under threat of demolition to service the needs of the tourist industry, it felt odd that all of the biennial sites were in Bukhara’s heinously pretty Old Town, as if the city beyond did not exist at all.10
Furthermore, the presence of Moscow and Russia in the biennial was overbearing. Yandex was one of its official sponsors, and there were numerous artists participating who did not only hail from Russia, but were still based there and connected to Russian institutions. I asked one of the members of the biennial team why there were no Ukrainian artists on the roster, given that the war in Ukraine continues to be a major geopolitical point of contention throughout the former Russian imperial zone. “Well, it’s about Central Asia”, they answered, as if to suggest that Ukraine has nothing to do with Central Asia. There are, of course, many Ukrainian artists with connections to Central Asia. Practically all Crimean Tatar artists born before the late 1980s were born in Central Asia, or their parents were, as the entire community had been deported, mostly to Uzbekistan, in 1940. Multiple other Ukrainian artists have strong family links to the region. The argument about regional specificity doesn’t hold up, and suggests instead that Ukraine was not considered a legitimate or safe terrain of concern by the organizers or patrons of the biennial.
The title of the biennial was “Recipes for Broken Hearts.” The word “decoloniality” was not frequently invoked, and I have heard that ACDF’s managers had, in fact, requested that it be removed from materials associated with the biennial. The spirit and content of the biennial was primarily defined in terms of commensality, food, emotion, digestion, and healing—but little concrete reference was made to the trauma which precipitates the necessity to heal. Trauma, here, is re-cast in terms of “heartbreak,” while invocations of the violence of the Russian imperial and Soviet past—not to speak of the political repression ongoing in Uzbekistan, nor of the multiple forms of extraction perpetrated unto Uzbekistan by the Russian neo-Empire—were also not on the menu.
It is in contexts such as these that the violences disavowed and camouflaged by the anodyne artistic doxa of “healing” and “care” are rendered particularly conspicuous. Might “care” and “healing,” perhaps function—in all their cutesy faux-horizontalism—as worthy neoliberal successors to the Stalinist doxa of “Friendship” (which, not incidentally, continues to provide a frame for diplomatic relations between Russia and Uzbekistan today)?
As Campbell writes in the biennial booklet, the intention of the program is to “infuse” viewers “with the energy to imagine a joyful world where everyone’s head can feel lighter and everyone’s stomach can be full.”11 Explicit invocations of pain and of politics—and especially of pain caused by politics—were largely absent from the program, although one powerful installation, by Saudi-Palestinian artist Dana Awartani, which re-created the floor tiling pattern of the fourteenth-century Hamam al-Sammara in Gaza, destroyed by Israeli bombardment in December 2023—should be mentioned as an exception. While the invocation of Palestine is not controversial in the Uzbekistani political context in the same way that it would be in Germany or in the United States, I cannot help but wonder what kind of political gesture an artwork referring to Russia’s war against Ukraine would have made.
As I prepared to leave Bukhara, I was introduced to Campbell by a mutual acquaintance outside a fancy lunch organized for the press junket in what was to become the biennial restaurant, Café Oshqozon. She elaborated on the practical consequences of the commensality and healing theme. “When we arrived here, I discovered that Bukhara doesn’t really have a fine dining scene at all. So we’re going to empower local chefs by training them during the course of the biennial and providing them with the skills necessary to open their own restaurants.” She also mentioned that the biennial paid the celebrity foreign artists participating, such as Anthony Gormley, the same fee that artists and the many craftspeople from Uzbekistan received for their participation. If true, on one level, this is certainly commendable.
On another level, it would seem that the colonialist-Stalinist capital “F” model of ethno-national hierarchy of artistic labor seems to resurface in Bukhara. Indeed, on the two days I visited the biennale, this hierarchical model was on vivid display, in practice if not by design. On the day of the opening, the artists themselves stood by their artworks, guiding and engaging with the visitors; the next day, when most of the VIP guests were gone, many of the artists, too, seemed to have disappeared. The local craftspeople, however, were now on duty in front of many of the works, interacting with those visitors who were able to speak to them in Uzbek, Tajik, or Russian.
The activities of the ACDF are marked by many gestures, which may be perceived as having political content or effect. Directly political actions, however, are not to be discussed at the dastarkhan (the feasting table), which is a “safe space” for healing, love, and commensality. Marvel at history, at how well-polished the (yet undemolished) heritage is. Enjoy your new Uzbek cuisine, empower local chefs, be-Friend the Uzbek craftspeople. Ride your Russian taxi, surrender your user data to the FSB. But don’t mention the war.
Daryna Antoniuk, “Regulators Fear Russia Could Access Yandex Taxi Data From Europe, Central Asia,” The Record, August 9, 2023, ➝.
Jeff Sahadeo, Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent 1865–1923 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 39.
“Centre for Contemporary Arts in Tashkent’s First-year Programme,” e-flux announcement for ACDF, September 15, 2025, ➝.
“About CIsC,” ➝.
These efforts culminated in the listing of a further twenty-four structures in 2024; and in the publication of two major volumes devoted to the modernist heritage of Tashkent, including a 1,000-page monolith lead-edited by Tashkent-born architecture historian Boris Chukhovich. See Boris Chukhovich et al. eds., Tashkent Modernism XX/XXI, (Zürich: Lars Müller, 2025), 499–537.
Greg Castillo, “Soviet Orientalism: Socialist Realism and Built Tradition,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 8, no. 2 (1997): 40.
A short propaganda reel celebrating Uzbek hospitality and the “width of the Uzbek soul” was produced by the Presidential Administration and released to accompany the announcement. See “Название «Дружба народов» вернут дворцу и станции метро,” (The Name “Friendship of Peoples” Will be Restored to the Palace and Metro Station), Gazeta, April 27, 2018, ➝; Zukhra Kasimova, “The Shamakhmudovs, Part I: Family and Kinship Metaphors in the Soviet Symbolic Order”, NYU Jordan Center (blog), April 14, 2021, ➝.
Contrary to historical fact, official Soviet “Friendship of the Peoples” historiography (from the 1950s onwards) represented the violent conquest of Turkestan, alongside all other Russian imperial coercive expansions, as acts of “voluntary accession” to the Russian Empire, and this terminology persists in the Russian Federation’s official historiography today; the 1920 Bolshevik siege of Bukhara is celebrated, with racialized imperial glee, in the 1954 film The Crushing of the Emirate (Krushenie Emirata), directed by Vladimir Basov and Latif Faiziyev.
On tourism and gentrification, see Gulnoza Usmonova, “Selling the Silk Road: How Gentrification is Reshaping Uzbekistan’s Historic Cities,” Ajam Media Collective, August 5, 2025, ➝.
The museification of the historical section of Bukhara in the form of the “Bukhara Heritage District,” under the direction of Waiwai design, is one of the direct consequences of the biennial, see “Bukhara Design District,” waiwai, ➝.
Diana Campbell, “Introduction,” Recipes for Broken Hearts, guidebook (Tashkent: ACDF, 2025).
