Uzbekistan (Republic of)

To make sense of the loss of the Aral Sea, eighteen-year-old Uzbek writer Allayar Darmenov invented mythologies. In his stories, swordfish visit remnants of saxaul forests, race through the water, remember the desert years. His replenished Aral is a space where fairy tales correspond to real life, where fantasy becomes agency.

If the climate crisis is a failure of imagination, then imagination is how the Aral will survive. The Aral’s demise echoes ecological upheavals worldwide. The pavilion invites local and international artists to approach the Aral as shared ground for myth-making. Working across installation, interactive work, and painting, Jahongir Bobokulov, Zi Kakhramonova, Aygul Sarsen, Zulfiya Spowart, Xin Liu, A.A.Murakami, and Nguyen Phuong Linh each engage the sea through their own ecological imagination.

The curatorial team comes from the Bukhara Biennial Curatorial School. The pavilion draws on Uzbekistan’s Art and Culture Development Foundation’s engagement with the region through the Aral Culture Summit – a transdisciplinary platform convening artists, scientists, policymakers to bridge scientific research with local knowledge – and the newly launched Aral School, a design programme building capacity and developing prototypes for the region’s future.