Recipes for Broken Hearts: Inside the Inaugural Bukhara Biennial
By Angela HuiThis autumn, all roads lead to Bukhara in Uzbekistan. The Silk Road city, with its turquoise domed mosques, labyrinthine bazaars and centuries of stories etched into stone, will play host to something entirely new. Beginning on 5 September and running to 20 November 2025, Uzbekistan has unveiled the inaugural Bukhara Biennial, the first cultural event of its kind in Central Asia, bringing together more than 70 projects under the theme “Recipes for Broken Hearts.”
Commissioned by Gayane Umerova, Chairperson of the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation, and curated by LA-born Diana Campbell, the Biennial gathers Uzbek, Central Asian and international voices in a programme of installations, performances, culinary rituals and workshops that weave heritage into contemporary life.
Its scale is ambitious, featuring contributions from more than 120 visual artists, performers, chefs, textile makers and musicians from across the globe. Among them: Carsten Höller, Jeong Kwan, Laila Gohar, and Subodh Gupta. But food is the thread that runs throughout, explored as a language of togetherness, healing and emotion.
Bukhara, once a centre for scholarship, invention and Silk Road trade, provides a fitting backdrop for the Biennial, part of a wider effort to revitalise the Old City and safeguard Uzbekistan’s heritage with Lebanese architect and artistic director Wael Al Awar. Inspired by the legend of philosopher-physician Ibn Sina, said to have created a dish to mend a broken heart, curator Campbell weaves art and food into rituals of connection that span cultures and centuries. This vision comes to life in Indian artist Subodh Gupta’s installation outside the Ayozjon Caravanserai, where enamelware from the Soviet era recalls domestic life and hospitality, while walls, tables and ceilings are layered with patterned ceramic plates with master potter Baxtiyor Nazirov to foreground intimacy over mass production. Extending beyond objects, Gupta cooks and serves food within the space, transforming the work into a communal act of eating.
Nearby, Colombian artist Delcy Morelos, in collaboration with local Uzbeki artist Baxtiyor Akhmedov, created a wooden pyramid sculpture painted with sand, clay, cinnamon, cloves and turmeric. The desert sun filters through its slatted, spiderweb-like walls, casting geometric shadows and releasing clouds of intoxicating spiced fragrance that linger in the air.
Food threads through the Biennial in ways that are intimate, spiritual, playful. South Korean Buddhist nun and Netflix Chef’s Table star Jeong Kwan will open and close the programme with fermentation as meditation. At the start of the Biennial, she prepares kimchi and doenjang; when the festival draws to a close, she uncovers them, revealing flavours deepened by time, a lesson in patience, decay and healing. With Uzbekistan home to Central Asia’s largest Korean diaspora, Kwan’s gesture is both an homage and an offering.
Elsewhere, New York-based Egyptian chef and artist, Laila Gohar, has worked with Ilkhom Shoyimkulov to build Navat Uy, a pavilion walled with long strands of rock sugar. As the Biennial progresses, the sugar slowly melts into sticky grape syrup, pooling on the ground like memory dissolving. The work is sweet and ephemeral, a reminder of how traditions slip away when replaced by industrial shortcuts.
At the Rice Cultures Festival, co-curated with Marie Hélène Pereira, a closing celebration where steaming iron kazans bubble with dishes from across the globe — jollof, pulao, paella, palov. Evocative of the Emir of Bukhara’s historic feasts, it becomes a communal act of storytelling, where rice plays an important part in many cultures, and this grain can bind continents together in history, migration and love.
At Café Oshqozon, a conceptual hub, food becomes a medium for storytelling and healing. Carsten Höller stages a brutalist lunch with one of Uzbekistan’s top chefs Bahriddin Chustiy, to bring vegetables back to their essence: beetroots, carrots and quince, seasoned only with salt or water, stripping back flavour to its barest truth.
Not everything is edible; the Biennial also creates space for thought and debate. The House of Softness, occupying the 16th-century Gavukshon Madrasas, will be a space for talks, workshops, and performances, exploring heritage, craft, and memory, including a fruit jewellery workshop led by Taus Makhacheva with collaborators and a panel highlighting women in art across Central Asia. Meanwhile, the AlMusalla Prize, presented by the Diriyah Biennale Foundation, examines the intersection of architecture, spirituality, and sustainability.
Collaboration is evident throughout: It is a space where local and international artists meet as equals, blurring the lines between the celebrated and the emerging. In Bukhara, art flows like migration: fluid, collective, instinctive. And what better place than a city where caravans once converged, carrying spices, silks, and secrets?
The inaugural Bukhara Biennial is free to attend. For more information, visit the official website.
Angela Hui is an award-winning writer and editor based in London. She has written for the BBC, The Guardian, The Financial Times, Lonely Planet, Time Out, Stylist, Vittles, Vogue and more. She’s also the author of Takeaway: A Childhood Behind the Counter.
Header photograph: Suchi Reddy in collaboration with Malika Berdiyarova, ‘Patterns of Protection, 2024–2025 .Photograph by Felix Odell.