For much of the twentieth century, the art of Central Asia existed on the margins of the global artistic landscape. Soviet cultural policy ensured that Moscow determined the language of art, the acceptable forms of expression and, ultimately, which works would be seen. Anything that fell outside the boundaries of Socialist Realism and officially sanctioned aesthetics was either pushed underground or removed from public view altogether.
It was within this historical rupture that a generation of nonconformist artists emerged. In Uzbekistan, no figure is more central to that story than Vyacheslav Akhunov. Today, it is impossible to imagine the history of contemporary art in Uzbekistan, or indeed in Central Asia as a whole, without him.
The Venice Biennale and Central Asia's Place Within It
To understand the significance of Akhunov's exhibition, it is worth remembering what the Venice Biennale represents for the global art world. Founded in 1895, it has become a global artistic forum that shapes the intellectual and aesthetic processes of our time.
For the countries of Central Asia, the road to Venice was long and complex. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the region’s art scene gained freedom but remained isolated. There was a lack of institutions, international networks, contemporary art museums and infrastructure to support artists. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, artists from Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan were more likely to appear as part of broader “Central Asian” projects than as representatives of distinct national scenes.
It was during this period that the international art world gradually began to discover the region. Curators, researchers and independent artists played a crucial role in that process, many of them working for decades with little or no institutional support. One of those artists was Vyacheslav Akhunov.
An Artist Outside the System
Vyacheslav Akhunov was born in 1948 in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, but his artistic biography is inseparable from Tashkent. He belongs to the generation of Soviet nonconformist artists who refused to submit to the official language of state-sanctioned art.
But unlike the Moscow Conceptualists, who operated in an underground yet still active intellectual environment, Akhunov worked in near-total isolation. Tashkent in the 1970s was far from being a centre of contemporary art. There were no institutions supporting experimental practice, no market, no independent galleries or international contacts. He had to build his own artistic system largerly on his own.
This is why themes of inner dialogue, memory and quiet resistance are so central to Akhunov’s work. His practice has always been shaped by the impossibility of speaking openly, with Soviet ideology appearing not as an object of direct critique, but rather as something to be deconstructed.
From the mid-1970s onwards, Akhunov began working with text, slogans, newspapers and Soviet symbolism, transforming the imagery of propaganda into material for conceptual analysis. Through repetition, bureaucratic language and the endless reproduction of ideological formulas, he explored the mechanisms of power. While his work shares affinities with Moscow Conceptualism, it has always retained a distinct visual language rooted in the cultural landscape of the East.
In his art, the Soviet system emerges as a machine designed to suppress memory, individuality and spirituality.
Instruments of the Mind Exhibition: Spring 2026
The project formed part of the official parallel programme of the 61st Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art and became the first major international project of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Tashkent (CCA Tashkent), which opened in the same year.
The title of the project, Instruments of the Mind, refers to the Sanskrit origin of the word mantra, derived from manas (“mind”) and tra (“instrument”). This etymology becomes a key to the entire exhibition. Akhunov is interested in language as a mechanism of power, as a form of inner resistance and as a means of preserving memory. The exhibition is not structured chronologically, but around themes of censorship, delayed projects, ideological pressure and the lack of institutional support, which meant that many of the artist’s works were never realised at the time.
Many of these works were conceived as early as the 1970s, a period when ideas often had to be developed quietly, with little hope of ever being brought to life.
The exhibition opens with Triumphal Arch (1979/2026), a monumental four-metre-high structure made from 365 metal scissors. Resembling the ceremonial architecture of Soviet celebrations and official inaugurations, the work is both unsettling and deeply ironic. Here, the scissors become a symbol of constant cutting away: censorship, bureaucratic control and violence against free expression. This recurring sense of everyday pressure runs through the exhibition like a central nerve.
Many works in the exhibition have been realised for the first time from archival sketches. These include the neon installation What Am I Doing Here? (1979/2026), in which personal reflection becomes a political statement, and House of Infinity / Sarcophagus (1986/2026), an architectural structure that simultaneously evokes a mausoleum, an archaeological site and a repository of memory.
One of the exhibition’s key works is Work for the Drawer (1978/2026).
Italian craftsmen built a writing desk more than three metres high, with a regular-sized desk and chair underneath it. Inside the large desk are storage compartments with preserving jars. And below are my works, works that could have landed me in the Mordovian camps in Soviet times. All nonconformists, whether poets, writers and artists, worked ‘for the drawer’ in the Soviet era, because censorship would not allow their work to be seen and the KGB persecuted them.
Vyacheslav Akhunov
A significant part of the exhibition is dedicated to Akhunov’s decades-long exploration of the Soviet slogan as a form of secular “mantra”. Beginning in the 1970s, he worked with newspapers, dressmaking patterns, magazines and books, overlaying them with repeated textual interventions. In series such as Modelling, Rupture and The Party’s Red Line, the language of Soviet ideology undergoes a kind of dismantling: through repetition and the mechanical reproduction of slogans, their inner emptiness and latent violence are gradually laid bare.
Yet the exhibition is not confined to political commentary alone. Themes of memory, inner migration and spiritual resilience run throughout the project. Recurring images of the desert, the suitcase and the nightingale become symbols of fragility and survival. In The Nightingale (1977), inspired by the poetry of Saadi Shirazi, dozens of images of birds are enclosed in glass jars: memories preserved, yet isolated from the world.
For the project’s curator, Sara Raza, the exhibition represents not only the artist’s personal story but also the very nature of conceptual art in Central Asia. In her view, Akhunov’s practice is grounded in “self-analysis and spiritual endurance”, while the meaning of his works unfolds through repetition, return and the gradual accumulation of visual and textual layers.
The project also inaugurates the programme of CCA Tashkent, the country’s first institution of its kind, established by the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation.
How Uzbekistan Developed Its Own Cultural Strategy
If just ten years ago Uzbekistan’s participation in international art life was largely occasional, today the country is steadily building its own cultural infrastructure. A key role in this process is played by the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation, which in recent years has initiated a range of large-scale international projects, exhibitions, restoration programmes, and institutional initiatives.
Uzbekistan’s Previous Projects in Venice
Uzbekistan’s history at the Venice Biennale is relatively short, but no less significant for that. For many years, artists from the country participated as part of broader Central Asian initiatives. The national pavilion emerged as an independent platform only in recent years.
A major breakthrough came in 2022, when Uzbekistan presented its first full national pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. The project, Dixit Algorizmi: The Garden of Knowledge, was dedicated to the legacy of the medieval scholar al-Khwarizmi and explored the relationship between the history of knowledge, algorithms and contemporary technology.
The next step followed in 2024 at the 60th Biennale. Aziza Kadyri’s pavilion, Don’t Miss the Cue, examined migration, labour, female identity and digital surveillance.
Why This Exhibition Matters Today
The most striking quality of Akhunov’s project is its remarkable contemporary relevance. Although most of the works are based on ideas conceived in the 1970s and 1980s, the exhibition feels anything but archival. Its themes of censorship, ideological pressure, bureaucratic violence and the impossibility of speaking freely remain universal, resilient and urgently relevant. That is precisely why Akhunov’s art extends far beyond the post-Soviet context.
There is, however, another important dimension. For Central Asia, the exhibition represents an act of restoring its own artistic history. For decades, the region’s art existed in fragments, without institutional memory, museums, archives or international recognition. Today, works that spent decades stored away in the artist’s studio stand at the centre of the global art scene. There is a sense of historical justice in that.
When Akhunov first created these works, he understood that they might never be seen by the public. Today they occupy the halls of Palazzo Franchetti, one of the key venues of the Venice Biennale.
Perhaps that is the central message of Instruments of the Mind: an idea can be hidden, postponed or forgotten for decades, yet it never ceases to exist.
