As I sit in the courtyard of the 16th-century Khoja Gavkushon complex and watch the water catch the late afternoon light, I’m struck by how the site embodies the spirit of Uzbekistan’s first international art biennial. This courtyard has witnessed centuries of gathering, commerce, and cultural exchange. Now it serves as the beating heart of the biennial’s inaugural edition, where tradition and contemporary art converge in ways both tender and transformative.Dust gets on everything here—my black pants will never be quite the same again. But as curator Diana Campbell said, standing next to Subodh Gupta’s pavilion on the biennial’s opening day, “The sun, the wind, the dust are all collaborators in this work.” It’s a philosophy that runs counter to the sterile white cube galleries of the international art world, a statement “against over museum-ifying.” In the Bukhara Biennial (on view through November 20), art lives where people live.Located in the heart of Central Asia, Bukhara was an intellectual and economic center situated along the Silk Road, a place where, during its 16th-century golden age, religious and cultural traditions from all corners of the world commingled. The biennial continues that tradition by commissioning works that will go on to have lives of their own and travel globally, reverberating.The first edition draws its title, “Recipes for Broken Hearts,” from the legend of Ibn Sina, also known as Avicenna. The Islamic golden age scholar allegedly invented plov, Uzbekistan’s national rice dish, to heal a prince whose heart broke when he could not marry a craftsman’s daughter. The exhibition wagers that art, like recipes, can transmit healing across time and space, offering sustenance for both body and soul.Indeed, food emerges as a central organizing principle throughout the biennial, extending far beyond mere sustenance to become a medium for cultural exchange and collective healing. During opening week, a public plov party embodied this spirit, bringing together visitors and residents in a communal feast that transformed eating into an act of cultural bridge-building, recipes becoming vehicles for connection across difference.Food finds artistic expression in various projects. Gupta’s pavilion comes alive through his performative cooking sessions, where the preparation and sharing of meals transform the installation from static display into active social space. Laila Gohar’s Navat Uy(2024–25) transforms the traditional rock sugar of Uzbek hospitality into a crystalline pavilion that visitors can literally taste.Meanwhile, the Brutalist Kitchen menu, developed in dialogue with Carsten Höller’s culinary manifesto, reimagines Uzbek ingredients like lamb, tomatoes, quince, and pumpkin through radical simplicity: Each dish is made from a single ingredient, plus only water and salt. This conceptual approach to vernacular cuisine produces some unexpected flavors, but admittedly lacks the communal warmth of the plov party.WALKING SWEATILY THROUGH the Cultural District designed by architect Wael Al Awar and touring the artworks under the baking sun—while wondering whether it might have been prudent to open just slightly later in the year—I found the biennial’s ambitious scale becoming tangible. The exhibition includes more than 70 projects spanning 500 meters of public space, beginning at Toqi Sarrafon, a 16th-century “trading dome.” The route follows the path of the ancient Shakhrud Canal, which once brought water from the Zarafshon River through a sophisticated system of hauz pools. The restored Magoki Attori Mosque—which has served as Zoroastrian temple, synagogue, and carpet museum across its long history—now houses a biennial visitor information center.The district’s plan treats Bukhara’s architectural heritage not as frozen monument but living infrastructure. Al Awar describes restoring the buildings “continuously, with knowledge shared over generations according to an oral tradition, aided by design drawings as references,” adding that “the city’s architectural heritage is not fixed in time but rather in constant transformation.” Rather than temporary pavilions or new permanent structures, the exhibition vivaciouslyinhabits existing buildings. Works wind through mahallas, or neighborhoods, that are home to many artisans, as the district dissolves boundaries between city and exhibition space.Work by Antony Gormley and Temur Jumaev in the 2025 Bukhara Biennial.Photo by Adrien DirandAntony Gormley’s CLOSE (2024–25) makes use of this architectural integration, transforming the ruins of the 16th-century Khoja Kalon mosque into a brick labyrinth. Working with Bukharian art restorer Temur Jumaev, Gormley created thousands of mud bricks, celebrating what he calls “the original pixel”—the handmade unit that has shaped human civilization for millennia. Gormley’s first attempted journey to Bukhara from India 50 years ago, while studying Buddhism, was thwarted at Afghanistan’s border with Uzbekistan. For him, finally arriving represents a long-deferred pilgrimage. The work is meant to resonate with Bukhara’s spiritual heritage, resembling a Naqshbandi shrine and celebrating a distinct Sufi order that started in the 14th century and emphasized mindfulness. The fact of the Khoja Kalon’s partial ruin, he told me, allows for “a kind of poetic interplay between presence and absence.”Throughout, the biennial insists on genuine collaboration between international artists and local artisans. Every work in the exhibition was produced in Uzbekistan. Gupta’s dome-shape pavilion, Salt Carried by the Wind(2024–25),is covered in the ubiquitous Soviet-era enamelware commonly found in Uzbek homes. Meanwhile, its interior is filled with delicate handmade ceramics created in collaboration with master ceramicist Baxtiyor Nazirov. David Soin Tappeser’s Mur-Mur(2024–25)comprises clay whistles, or hushtaks, traditionally made during Navruz to blow away winter and ward off evil. Working with the students of legendary ceramicist Kubaro Babaeva, visitors are invited to record melodies that build into a growing, murmuration-like chorus. I’ll admit that my whistle-playing abilities were questionable at best, but carrying home my clay bird felt like taking a piece of Bukhara’s creative ethos with me.Delcy Morelos and Baxtior Akhmedov’s La Sombra Terrestre (The Earth’s Shadow) 2024–25, meanwhile, uses “Eye of God” techniques indigenous to the Americas with help from Bukharian collaborators. Strings are woven through columns and painted with a spice mixture of earth, desert sand, clay, cinnamon, cloves, and turmeric. The recipe came from a fourth-generation family of Bukharian spice merchants, and indeed, entering this space feels like being embraced by Bukhara’s mercantile history, where the scent of cardamom and turmeric conjures the city’s past as a trading hub. The work doesn’t simply reference cultural exchange, it embodies it, marrying Colombian weaving techniques with Central Asian architectural forms.Throughout, international artists collaborate with locals and honor their wisdom: Spice merchants contribute recipes to Morelos’s installation, chefs such as Elena Reygadas and Fatmata Binta draw connections between Uzbek and world cuisines, the artist collective Slavs and Tatars hangs melons in a structure inspired by Bukharian gold embroidery. Food becomes both metaphor and method for this kind of cultural translation.Work by Kamruzzaman Shadhin and Zavkiddin in the 2025 Bukhara Biennial.TUCKING INTO A paper bowl of deliciously oily plov, I consider the biennial’s larger implications. President Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s tenure has seen Uzbekistan’s government invest heavily in the cultural sphere. In 2017, he founded Uzbekistan’s Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF), with a mission to preserve and promote the country’s culture on the global stage. Its initiatives, pioneered by curator Gayane Umerova, range from opening the Center for Contemporary Art in Tashkent next March to organizing exhibitions of Uzbek art at institutions like the Louvre, while also commissioning Uzbekistan’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Soon, Uzbekistan will host the UNESCO General Conference in Samarkand.Yet the ambitious vision also lays the ground for tensions inherent in international cultural initiatives. The opening ceremony was conducted entirely in English. When I asked a volunteer about materials in Uzbek, they confirmed that the guidebooks were not available in the local language, though signage throughout the sites includes Uzbek translations.Umerova defended this choice, arguing that English has become the international lingua franca, and that many Bukharans speak English for their livelihoods. “We intentionally did it in English,” she explained, “because we want to speak to the outside world.” The pragmatism is understandable, but it raises questions about whose voices are centered in cultural dialogue. For Campbell—who is not from Uzbekistan, but identifies as biracial and finds herself “always having to translate stories across very large contextual and cultural divides”—such tensions are less obstacles than opportunities for dialogue.According to Campbell, “Speaking to the young people of Bukhara—they are sick and tired of being depicted as stuck in time in 16th-century Bukhara. They are living in 2025, but with all of the respect and knowledge that comes from their heritage.” She points out that “all art was once contemporary.”Indeed, in Bukhara, past and present collapse in on each other, with still other projects mourning what was lost. Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser’s Longing (2024–25) stretches a monumental ikat tapestry along the canal threading through Bukhara’s cultural center, its palette drawn from satellite imagery documenting the Aral Sea’s catastrophic shrinkage over the past century. The work functions simultaneously as environmental testimony and emotional geography, tracing what the artists call “the presence of an absence,” echoing Gormley. For many Uzbeks in this doubly landlocked country, the Aral Sea represented their only imagination of the ocean. Its vanishing constitutes not just ecological disaster but profound cultural loss—or a broken heart.Ultimately, the biennial’s power lies not in individual artworks but in their cumulative effect—the way Kamruzzaman Shadhin’s puppet processions animate the streets each evening of the opening weekend, how David Soin Tappeser’s Mur-Mur invites visitors to contribute hushtak melodies to a growing participatory soundscape, how the renovated spaces hum again with the energy that made Bukhara a medieval center of learning and culture.