Curated by Sophie Mayuko Arni, Aziza Izamova, Kamila Mukhitdinova, Nico Sun, and Thái Hà
Uzbekistan National Pavilion for the 61st Venice Biennale
Venue: Uzbekistan National Pavilion, 61st Venice Biennale, Arsenale
Exhibition Website
Supported by Saida Mirziyoyeva, Advisor to the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan
Commissioned by Gayane Umerova, Chairperson of the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation
The Aural Sea
The Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF) announces the Uzbekistan National Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, featuring the exhibition The Aural Sea. Commissioned by ACDF Chairperson Gayane Umerova, the Pavilion turns to mythmaking and storytelling as ways of responding to environmental transformation – and of learning from the Aral Sea region of Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan. Since the 1960s, the large-scale diversion of the region's rivers for agricultural irrigation has caused the Aral Sea to lose over 90% of its volume, turning one of the world's largest inland lakes into desert.
The Aral basin has long been a crossroads. Situated on the northern branch of the Silk Road, the region's archaeological record reveals layers of civilisation shaped by the dynamics of water. When Marco Polo travelled through Central Asia in the thirteenth century, the Aral Sea does not appear in his account, an absence that resonates with a landscape whose shorelines have shifted over centuries.
Here, the presence and absence of water is not only a modern condition but a long temporal structure that continues to shape how communities live, remember, and imagine. Fishermen have told stories of glimpsing ruined cities on the lakebed; such moments became the seeds of new legends, binding past and future in a single image.
The Pavilion takes inspiration from Karakalpak author Allayar Darmenov, who began writing the Aral Sea back to life in 2015, when he was eighteen. In his fiction, swordfish race through replenished waters and remember the desert years. Following Darmenov, the Pavilion proposes imagination as a form of agency: mythmaking and storytelling not as escape, but as tools for navigating loss and holding open space for what might yet be possible.
Tushingni suvga ayt, "tell your dream to the water", so goes the Uzbek saying.
Closing your eyes, you picture waves rolling towards your feet, the sensation distantly familiar, like hearing an echo or smelling a scent you can't quite place. The wind brushes sand against your shins, but wait, they are your grandfather's shins, poking out from his salt-worn shorts: you are dreaming his memories.You open your eyes to waves receding to saltcrust. How do you tell the water your dream, if when you dream it is of water?
Once the world's fourth-largest inland body of water, the Aral Sea has lost over 90% of its volume since the 1960s due to Soviet-era irrigation schemes. The ecological consequences have been severe – desertification, loss of biodiversity, public health crises resulting from toxic dust storms. Amid the loss of the Aral Sea, Allayar Darmenov, the then 18-year-old Karakalpak writer, turned to an ancient human tool to make sense of the environmental changes happening around him: he invented mythologies. In his stories, schools of fish visit the remnants of saxaul forests, race each other in the water, remember the days when the desert prevailed. His descriptions of life in the replenished Aral inhabit a space where fairy tales correspond to real life, where fantasy is agency.
Inspired by his approach, the Uzbekistan National Pavilion constructs a new myth of the Aral Sea, underscored by a new commission of Darmenov's writing. Working across installation, painting, textile, and participatory artworks, the artists Jahongir Bobokulov, Zi Kakhramonova, Aygul Sarsen, Zulfiya Spowart, A.A.Murakami, Xin Liu, and Nguyen Phuong Linh engage their imaginations to learn with and from the Aral. Darmenov's story The Labyrinth writes their artworks into his mythical world, not as objects but as deities, monsters, and natural phenomena. As such, the artworks are living, dreaming, searching for forms of climate resilience that affirm the Aral as an enduring site of creation.
The Aural Sea is a story told from the perspectives of sand, salt, sun, water, spirits, seashells, and enzymes. Its temporality extends beyond a single human lifespan, traveling between inherited and personal memories. In various explorations of the Aral's materiality, its metabolic circulations, and the transmission of generational knowledge, the artists attune to the Aral's history as a cycle: of becoming, decay, and transformation.
A.A.Murakami, The Sun Sets in a Shell, 2026
Knitted and woven wool
Produced with the support of Mandarin and Zegna Baruffa Lane Borgosesia
400 x 1000 cm
Artwork commissioned by the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation
A.A.Murakami's tapestry captures environmental transformations through the coded patterns of the zebra mussel, or Dreissena polymorpha, a species native to the Aral Sea. Inspired by scientific models of shell formation, the artist duo developed an algorithmic knitting pattern that mimics the shells' biochemical formation. The tapestry shows triangular forms, spirals, waves, and fractal repetitions stretched, compressed, and disrupted. These natural mutations in the shell's pattern, caused by changes in temperature, salinity, acidity, and calcium levels, turn the mussels into time capsules of different points in the sea's history. Long fascinated by the natural systems that lie at the origins and future of our existence, the artist duo employs both digital technology and tactile making methods to bring the speculative into the physical world. The Sun Sets in a Shell considers zebra mussels artifacts of the Aral Sea's many moments in time, monumentalizing their patterns to keep alive the logic of their formation.
All images: Courtesy of Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation.