Routes
The story goes that the Muslim elders used to sit around the fire once the day’s work was finished and tell stories to brighten the evening hours. They always began with the same phrase: “Kan ma kan Bidna nihki Willa innam?” which roughly means: “There was, there was not, shall we tell stories, or shall we will rest on our beds?”.
Cherry image (2015) by Ahmad Babaev
This Imago Mundi collection dedicated to Uzbekistan is confirmation that its artists have not lost their inspiration and their ability to tell stories. And that the contemporaneity of this Asian Republic, land of great conquerors and distant empires – from Cyrus to Alexander, from Tamerlane to Nicholas II, from the Arabs to the Turks, to the Mongols, to the Russians – is still closely tied to myths and legends, no less than to the weaving of the fine rugs, decorated with floral elements or brightly coloured medallions, that take the name of the legendary city of Samarkand.
Untitled (2015)
by Davron Toshev
At the same time, with over 30 million inhabitants (more than a third of whom are under the age of 15), Uzbekistan is now the most populous country in Central Asia and aspires to become its cultural and economic hub.
Marriage (2015)
by Dilshod Azizov
Set in the ancient basin formed by the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, its cities were at the crossroads of the Silk Road and the Spice Routes, which over time fed Europe with flavours, perfumes, luxury and material goods, but also with “technical skills, scientific knowledge and artistic influences, religious beliefs, and legends, whose echo can be traced from one people to another, from one century to the next”.
She-wolf (2015)
by Fayzullahan Ahmadaliev
We are all heirs to these exchanges, to the labour and the intelligence of so many peoples. We just have to remember, for example, that we owe the terms algorithm and algebra to the mathematician Al-Khwārizmī, who lived between 780 and 840 in Khiva, the ancient capital of Khwarezm, whose founder, according to legend, was Shem, the son of Noah.
Untitled (2015)
by Ferusa Erkabaeva
Samarkand, the sumptuous capital of the legendary Tamerlane (in Persian, Timur the Lame), with its turquoise domes that glow in the sun, itself evokes all the magic of the mid-fourteenth century. The Turko-Mongol sovereign, bringing together artisans, artists, mathematicians and astronomers from all corners of an empire whose reach extended as far as India, made it the cornerstone of the Islamic Renaissance.
Faith (2015)
by Firdavs Hazratov
The Bibi-Khanym Mosque is the largest in Central Asia and is said to derive its name from Tamerlane’s favourite wife. There are several legends surrounding its construction: one recounts the vengeance of the sovereign for a kiss on the cheek granted by Bibi-Khanym to the architect in charge of the work, which led Tamerlane to command that all women in his empire cover their faces with veils, and hence to the birth of the chador.
The great Silk Route (2015) by Jamshid Jumanov
There is also an ancient proverb that says: “If Samarkand is the beauty of the earth, Bukhara is the beauty of the spirit”. Bukhara is, in fact, one of the best places in Central Asia to gain an understanding of what things were like before the arrival of the Russians. In the city centre, largely under architectural protection, there are numerous madrasas (derivative of darasa: to study) – Koranic schools of simple volumes but elaborate decorations – minarets, an imposing royal fortress and the remains of a still lively market, described by Marco Polo in Milione as “a market where all the expensive goods of India and China are to be found, with many precious stones, with many good and heavy fabrics, there are also abundant spices. Indeed, in that place there is such a coming and going of goods that it is a wonderful thing to see”.
For water (2015)
by Javlon Umarbekov
Today, Uzbekistan has the second largest economy in Central Asia, after Kazakhstan, and its growth is driven by cotton exports and the rise in the price of gold, of which the country is the tenth producer in the world (unlike its neighbours bordering the Caspian Sea, Uzbekistan does not have vast reserves of oil or gas).
Gossip (2015)
by Khayrullo Kosimov
At the same time, the Uzbek territory falls within the new extension of the gas pipeline between Turkmenistan and China, which will include Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
Since 2012, the Republic of China has, in fact, become its main export partner, signalling the desire of Uzbekistan not to be excessively dependent on Moscow.
Portrait of a girl (2015)
by Khusan Kasimov
Many of the intellectual and political elites, for their part, have begun the process of the rediscovery and actualization of the theoretical legacy of British geographer Halford John Mackinder, who in 1904, with the article The Geographical Pivot of History, identified Eurasia as the “geographical pivot” of the world
(also known as the “Heartland Theory”).
The city on the rock - Sheikhantaur (2015) by Muhammad Fazilov
This rediscovery shrouds the Uzbek cultural identity in classicism, a sum of historical (the mixing of nomadic and sedentary Central Asian populations), religious (the spread of Islam, whose roots lie in harmonious and inclusive Sufism), economic and political elements (Russian and Soviet colonialism, geographical and historical proximity to India and China), which pervade both the social organization of the country, and its traditions and artistic expressions.
Kurash (2015) by Niezali Kholmatov
If the Twenties and Thirties were crucial to the birth of a true Uzbek artistic movement inspired by the Russian school, since the Sixties a marked synthesis of tradition, Western influences and Far Eastern inspirations has developed. The architectural academic and collector Andrej Kosinskij, for example, told to “Voice of Russia”, that “a very interesting situation was created in the artistic life of Tashkent. Despite the fact that socialist realism was the only artistic genre in the USSR, that official art surprisingly managed to coexist alongside totally different forms. There was a group of painters I call the počvenniki, namely those ‘tied to the earth’. Artists whose art took inspiration from the earth and used traditional elements”.
Self portrait (2015)
by Sarvinoz Qosimova
Even today, the artistic exploration of the Uzbek artists relates to the promotion of national identity and of historical and cultural traditions, but with a nod to the avant-garde and post modernism.
Quroq (2015) by Uktamboy Saidov
In a scenario open to the world and the future – the artistic movement has the support of events such as the Tashkent International Biennale of Contemporary Art – the 140 works of the Imago Mundi collection offer us the Uzbekistan of wide open spaces under the Asian sky and of dense and populous places like the spice markets. They offer us the realism of Uzbek faces that combine the genetic makeup of East and West, alongside the abstract interpretation of the colours of the country’s past: the splendour of gold and of corals, cobalts and turquoises, reds of the sand, yellows of the light.
East woman (2015) by Zilola Sulaymonova
Rational expressions and flights of fancy, interpretations and inquiry which, in a network of routes, trails and paths, like on the Silk Road, overlap, sometimes crossing each other, sometimes moving apart. Inner worlds and common realities, the wisdom of history, the vortex of life and the energy of youth: Uzbekistan shows us life through its young and ancient eyes. As the poet of Fergana Šamšad Abdullaev wrote: “the world will exist as long as something moves young people and they move us”.
Luciano Benetton
