Uzbekistan opened its first museum dedicated to contemporary art.
A recent event at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Tashkent. Courtesy the Art & Culture Development Foundation.
The Centre for Contemporary Art opened in Uzbekistan earlier this month, making it the nation’s first institution dedicated exclusively to contemporary and modern art. Located in Tashkent, the country’s capital as well as its largest city, the museum is housed in a former diesel power plant built in 1912 and designed by architect Willhelm Heinzelmann.
The institution’s inaugural exhibition, curated by Andrea Lissoni, senior curator of London’s Tate Modern, along with Gayane Umerova, the executive director of the Uzbek culture ministry’s Art and Culture Development Foundation, is a free show by Uzbek filmmaker and video artist Saodat Ismailova titled “Qo’rg’on Chiroq” (or “Light on the Hill”). The exhibition will continue through June 1st and coincide with a series of performances, lectures, and film screenings.
Umerova told Artforum:
Our initial focus is on interdisciplinarity, with plans to tie practices in contemporary art, filmmaking, educational initiatives, experimental theatre productions and modern choreography to the institutional forms we find new for us—multimedia laboratories, art residencies and workshops for children. [. . .] It will lay the foundation for our future-oriented development.
