Seeing Slowly: How a Remote Desert City in Uzbekistan Became a Refuge for Banned Art

Deana Kotiga is an anthropologist, documentary photographer and writer whose work is rooted in over a decade of studying human behaviour. Her focus lies in the everyday — in how people move through the world, how they interact with their environments and each other, and how meaning is made in moments we often overlook. Bridging academic research with creative practice, her camera isn’t drawn to spectacle, but to stillness — to the quiet details that speak volumes about a place. In her series, Seeing Slowly, for Something Curated, Kotiga explores the meeting point of travel, visual anthropology and storytelling.

The ride was long, and everything was beige. Not in a dull way, but in that particular way where sand seems to filter into the air itself, softening the edges of buildings, slowing the passage of time. It felt like everything moved in low resolution. Hours stretched. The sky sat low. We were finally here. Uzbekistan. A place I’d dreamed of visiting for years. I have to admit: Jess planned everything. It was her idea. Her maps. Her itinerary. I just said yes.

We were in a taxi, somewhere on the road into Karakalpakstan. The name – Karakalpakstan – comes from the Karakalpak people, meaning “black hat people.” A semi-autonomous republic within Uzbekistan, caught between memory and marginality. It was once part of the Silk Road, later absorbed into the Soviet sphere, and now often left out of the travel stories told about the region.

We stayed in a homestay in Nukus. A small concrete house with a metal gate and a small basketball court in the courtyard. We found the listing online, put up by the son, who worked remotely from Tashkent. We were welcomed by his parents: warm, reserved, kind. Their teenage daughter wore headphones most of the time, the younger son watched us curiously from a corner of the room. Inside, they’d given us slippers: dozens of slippers lined by the front door, in pairs, tripping over each other in every size and shade.

Outside, the town felt suspended. Empty, but full. Wide streets with barely anyone in them. Massive Soviet-era buildings loomed – cold, concrete, functional – relics from a time that lost their purpose. Some were still in use, others hollowed out, weather-stained, quiet. It was uncanny. As if the present hadn’t fully arrived, or the past hadn’t completely left.

First thing we did, the Savitsky Museum. Built in 1966 by Igor Savitsky, the quiet collector who defied Stalin’s ban on Russian avant-garde art by hiding forbidden works in this desert outpost. Today, the museum houses over 82,000 items: from folk jewelry and Karakalpak carpets to the second-largest cache of Russian avant-garde paintings in the world. They call it the Louvre in the Sands: a misconception that misses the point: it’s less about glamorous prestige and more about stubborn survival in isolation. A kind of resistance.

Inside, the air was still, heavy with colour and memory. The guide spoke in perfect English: stories of artists exiled, works condemned, but saved. Art that should have disappeared survived here only because the state’s eye never fully reached Nukus.

Later, over tea, Jess and I spoke in our optimistic Russian – the kind built from being polyglots, a few intensive classes, and a lot of professional guesswork. Not fluent, not correct, but understandable. We were trying.

We sat barefoot in borrowed slippers, eating plov and drinking tea. They smiled kindly, replying slowly, filling in the gaps. We talked about Karakalpakstan, about Uzbekistan. They had celebrated a birthday the day before. They were a big family. They had built their house on their own. The father was planning to go to London that winter, to try and earn some money. I thought then: nothing about this place asks for attention, but everything here carries the trace of something larger. The museum. The ruins. The silence in the streets. The endless, sand-coloured air.

Resistance here isn’t loud. It isn’t dramatic. It’s in the choice to stay. To build your own house. To lay out slippers for strangers. To keep a museum full of banned art open, even when no one is watching. It’s in the paintings that shouldn’t have survived. In the stories that were never meant to be told. Karakalpakstan resists in small, exact ways.



Photography by Deana Kotiga