Save this story Save Story Save this story It’s been a landmark year for Uzbekistan. The country held its inaugural biennial in the ancient city of Bukhara last fall; 10 Soviet modernist buildings in its captial , Tashkent, were named UNESCO World Heritage Sites over the summer, making them the youngest structures in the world to receive that protected status; and its first permanent contemporary art museum, the Centre for Contemporary Arts Tashkent (CCA Tashkent) , opened in September.
Upon meeting Gayane Umerova—the woman behind Uzbekistan’s cultural awakening—one of my first questions is whether she was surprised by the biennial’s success.
“My expectations are always very high, so it didn’t really surprise me. It was exactly what I envisioned,” Umerova says. What did surprise her: that out of the 1.8 million visitors to the Bukhara Biennial, half were domestic. “That’s a big shift in society. For someone to travel from Kokand to Bukhara [some 460 miles away], that would never really happen unless you’re visiting relatives. Now people see Bukhara not only as a historical city, but also as somewhere exciting to discover.”
Her official titles include Head of the Department of Creative Economy and Tourism of the Administration of the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan, as well as Chairperson of the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF), an organization she founded in 2017 to support the country’s visual artists, writers, theatermakers, musicians, and choreographers. (We’re meeting in her office at the ACDF headquarters in Tashkent, a space tastefully decorated with sleek wooden furniture made by Levantine designer Nada Debs in collaboration with Uzbek artisans—another one of Umerova’s ideas.) She additionally serves as Chairperson of the National Commission of Uzbekistan on UNESCO Affairs under the Cabinet of Ministers, was awarded France’s Order of Arts and Literature in April 2025, and is a LACMA Global Ambassador. It’s no wonder that when I ask how she spends her free time, she retorts that she has none—though she does relish family time with her husband and three daughters.
“Because Uzbekistan is not a country where you have a lot of private collectors building museums or architectural sites, everything has to start with the state support and then rise within society,” Umerova explains, crediting the flurry of activity in Tashkent—like that in Doha or Riyadh—to the attention and investment of its leadership, namely Uzbekistan’s president, Shavkat Mirziyoyev.
Uzbekistan’s large (and growing) subset of young people also makes the country ripe for a cultural renaissance. As of July 2026 , more than half of Uzbekistan’s 39 million people are under 30. “You see it often in countries like Uzbekistan or Saudi Arabia, where there is a young population that they drive you,” Umerova says. “You meet people and see they’re creating things from nothing, and that’s really what motivated me to be in the art world.”
Much of Umerova’s desire to strengthen her country’s cultural ecosystem stems from her own childhood in Tashkent. With an aunt who was an artist and grandparents who collected antiquities, she grew up surrounded by the arts, though her first dream was to become an architect. Her father tried to steer her elsewhere, worried that she would be crowded out of such a male-dominated field: “He didn’t want me to end up behind the scenes of these great projects, like a secretary at a big firm.” Nevertheless, Umerova’s passion for architecture has come full circle, from her UNESCO advocacy to her partnerships with firms like the Paris-based Studio KO—which designed the CCA Tashkent—and Japanese starchitect Tadao Ando, who is currently at work on the new National Museum of Uzbekistan, scheduled to open in the capital in 2028.
Umerova received much of her education in the United Kingdom, discovering in Europe what she hoped to create at home. “I’d never seen museums like the Pompidou, which was so extravagant to me at the time,” she recalls. “I was inspired not just by the arts but the buildings that house them. I felt like I would love to do something like that in my own country.” Back in Tashkent, she served as a senior curator at the Art Gallery of Uzbekistan from 2008 to 2017, the year she started the ACDF.
Photo: Courtesy of Nafisa Parpieva and Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation. The majority of Umerova’s roughly 50-person team at the ACDF has lived or studied abroad. “I think we have the stigma of not hearing or seeing our country on the map, but now the younger population really wants to own that they’re from this country,” she says. She believes it has become a “collective ambition” to strengthen the country’s arts-education infrastructure from a young age. (In service of that goal, the ACDF was behind the renovation of the Nationwide Children’s Library, which has operated out of a 19th-century mansion in Tashkent since 1965.)
This demanded, in part, a reframing of what even constituted art. “In Uzbekistan, there are a lot of artisans, but they just see the traditional way of getting their work to people, for example, through fairs. They don’t really see themselves as artists. They only see themselves as makers.” She traces that sensibility back to the fall of the Soviet Union, when, “for all Central Asian countries, it was about self-identity,” and “everything which was contemporary or modern was seen as foreign.”
While Umerova acknowledges the value of promoting Uzbek crafts, from woodcarving to papermaking, she sees no reason why contemporary art and design can’t also thrive. In 2022, the ACDF formed a partnership with the Michelangelo Foundation, marking the first time a Central Asian country joined its Homo Faber Guide, a curated digital platform spotlighting master artisans and ateliers around the globe. Uzbekistan also sent its first representatives to the Venice Architecture Biennale and the Venice Art Biennale in 2021 and 2022, respectively.
A testament to Uzbekistan’s success in Venice is London-based Uzbek artist Aziza Kadyri, who combines suzani, traditional hand-embroidered textiles, with AI. She participated in the Uzbekistan National Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Art Biennale, and last year she was commissioned for the Bukhara Biennial. (Visitors to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London can see a site-specific installation in which Kadyri responds to the museum’s historic suzani collection until January 10, 2027.)
Venice’s Biennale model has long inspired Umerova. “It’s like a living city with art,” she says, emphasizing the convenience of having most sites within walking distance of each other. With restoration at the heart of the Bukhara Biennial (the Historic Centre of Bukhara was added to the World Heritage List in 1993), Umerova conceived a master plan to ensure that the art and the impending tourist boom would not harm the city, the most complete medieval city in Central Asia. The inaugural edition saw local artists, such as ceramicist Abdulvahid Bukhoriy and metal engraver Jurabek Sidikov, transform a prayer room in a restored historic madrasa (a center of Islamic education), while participating international artists ranged from Egyptian multidisciplinary artist Wael Shawky to British sculptor Antony Gormley.
Of course, Uzbeks can now get their contemporary art fix year-round at the CCA Tashkent. Curated by Sara Raza, who specializes in postcolonial and post-Soviet art, the debut exhibition, “Hikmah”—Uzbek for “wisdom”—brings together works by artists near and far. The painstaking restoration of the building, originally constructed in 1912 as a diesel station, has also made a powerful statement about the potential of adaptive reuse.
Exterior of the Centre for Contemporary Arts Tashkent (CCA Tashkent).
The CCA Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s first permanent contemporary art museum, is housed in a former diesel station.
Conscious that modern buildings are often considered less precious than ancient sites—and therefore more vulnerable to being torn down—Umerova spent five years researching and applying for Tashkent’s Soviet modernist buildings to be granted UNESCO status. She also advocated for about 160 mosaic panels adorning residential and public buildings in Tashkent and other areas to be added to the National List of Real Estate Properties of Tangible Cultural Heritage in 2024. After an earthquake destroyed much of Tashkent in 1966, these mosaic designs were embedded into new constructions, becoming a distinctive part of Uzbekistan’s Soviet-era architectural landscape. Under this heritage status, the mosaics are protected from being dismantled, painted over, or covered with advertising.
Several more museums are underway in Uzbekistan, most notably the new National Museum, Tadao Ando’s first major project in Central Asia. The architect tells Vogue via email that he hopes the 40,000-square-meter institution “will become a spiritual anchor for its people and serve as a vibrant cultural center.” Its collection, currently housed in the State Museum of Arts (which will become a state museum of architecture—fitting, as it was one of the 10 buildings to earn UNESCO protection this year), is especially important to Umerova, as she often visited it with her parents and on school trips. The ACDF is also working on the Jadids’ Legacy Museum in Bukhara and the Silk Road Museum in Samarkand. They are projected to open in 2027 and 2029–30, respectively.
A rendering of the National Museum of Uzbekistan.
Umerova’s efforts have also reached American institutions. New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum loaned a monumental aerial sculpture by Nadia Kaabi-Linke, a Tunisian-Ukrainian artist based in Berlin, for the CCA Tashkent’s inaugural exhibition; and Umerova teases a major collaboration with the Smithsonian in 2029 that will have been 10 years in the making.
“Gayane Umerova is leading the cultural strategy for Uzbekistan with an uncommon combination of inspiring vision, executive follow-through, and a fine sense of what art means for human thriving and cohesion as well as social and economic development,” Dr. Mariët Westermann, director and CEO of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, told Vogue via email of Umerova’s “broad-spectrum” approach.
Umerova’s hope is that Uzbekistan will not just be a place more travelers want to visit, but one that they keep coming back to. “We want people to see our country on repeat,” she says. “Not just once in a lifetime.”
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Source: Lifestyle
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