11/03/2025
In October, Prof. Kasimova participated in the Symposium on the cross-cultural heritage of Uzbekistan titled “The Craft of Mending” as part of the inaugural Bukhara Biennial.
A three-day symposium’s main aim was to position Uzbekistan as a site of rich transregional exchange, highlighting cultural continuities and innovations that traverse Central, East, and Southeast Asia, the broader Middle East and North Africa, as well as post-Soviet countries. The symposium was held in English, in the inner courtyard of the Gavkushon madrasah, and was open to public, with simultaneous translation to Uzbek and Russian. Three days of presenting and attending talks at one of the historical centers of Islamic learning, among historians and art curators from thirteen countries, as well as exploring dozens of contemporary art installations (all envisioned as collabs between local craftspeople, expats, and foreign artists) created a one-of-a-kind experience of discovery and synthesis.
Prof. Kasimova gave a talk on a complex history of the Soviet-era art museum not far from the Aral Sea, which famously houses an eclectic collection of Russian avant-garde, Karakalpak applied art & Khorezmian ancient artifacts. Titled “National in Form, Hybrid in Content? Creation of the Savitsky Museum in Nukus,” Kasimova’s talk contended that the museum’s idiosyncratic collection compiled in the 1960s-1970s, was far from random, and signified the convergence of two “halted” experiments of the early-Soviet era, that of the Russian avant-garde art of the 1920s, and the Karakalpak nation-building “from below,” paused by the Stalin’s political purges of the 1930s.
Check out more on the Bukhara Biennial here: https://www.bukharabiennial.uz/programme/the-craft-of-mending-a-symposium-on-the-cross-cultural-heritage-of-uzbekistan
Pictures: Courtesy of Davron Madiev () from the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation and Zukhra Kasimova.
