Bukhara Biennial: Khoja returns, though he never left
Denis Davydov
2025
The installation created for the Bukhara Biennial brings many of the ideas behind Tent of Imagination into a single physical space. A three-channel video unfolds across a vertical screen embedded in a ceramic structure and two old television sets. Around them, dozens of ceramic khushtaks face the screens like an audience.
At its centre is Khoja Nasreddin, the great trickster of Central Asian folklore. His stories rarely produce a stable truth: it is never clear whether he is speaking seriously, deceiving someone, or using a joke to reveal something else.
At its centre is Khoja Nasreddin, the great trickster of Central Asian folklore. His stories rarely produce a stable truth: it is never clear whether he is speaking seriously, deceiving someone, or using a joke to reveal something else.
Responding to the Biennial’s proposition Recipes for Broken Hearts, Nasreddin offers his own cure: consumption. Shopping. The promise that acquiring something new might repair what is missing. Like most of his answers, it sits somewhere between wisdom and fraud.
The proposition carries another history. For centuries, goods, people and stories moved through Central Asia along the Silk Roads. Markets grew alongside caravanserais, teahouses, music and performance. Commerce and spectacle travelled together. Contemporary consumer desire appears here as a strange mutation of this older culture of circulation.
The soundtrack borrows the musical language of Disney’s Aladdin, bringing a fictionalised Western image of the “East” back into Central Asia. As Uzbekistan becomes increasingly visible internationally, a culture encounters an image of itself that has travelled through someone else’s imagination.
The soundtrack borrows the musical language of Disney’s Aladdin, bringing a fictionalised Western image of the “East” back into Central Asia. As Uzbekistan becomes increasingly visible internationally, a culture encounters an image of itself that has travelled through someone else’s imagination.
Nasreddin himself was found rather than invented. In the workshop of the Gulomov family in Bukhara, I discovered an old, unfinished ceramic figure made years earlier by Bahrom Gulomov, while he was still developing his own visual language. I photographed it and reconstructed it digitally. The protagonist is both a found object and a found character - carrying one artist’s history into another medium and another time.
The ceramic structure and more than sixty khushtaks were produced together with the Gulomov family. Clay, old television sets and digital animation coexist as different temporal states of the same image. The khushtaks surround the screens as spectators and witnesses. The traditional medium does not disappear when the digital image arrives. It sits in front of it and watches.
Nasreddin himself has travelled through oral storytelling, literature, theatre, Soviet cinema and television. His migration into a digital body feels almost inevitable.
Nasreddin himself has travelled through oral storytelling, literature, theatre, Soviet cinema and television. His migration into a digital body feels almost inevitable.
Within Tent of Imagination, the installation becomes a meeting point between the digital travelling theatre and the material culture from which its characters emerge. Craft becomes actor, object becomes audience, folklore becomes media, and the screen becomes a temporary stage. Nasreddin stands between them, promising that desire can cure a broken heart - and leaving us uncertain whether we are supposed to believe him.
Computer-generated image
Edition of 1 + 1 AP
Courtesy of the Artist
Edition of 1 + 1 AP
Courtesy of the Artist
Project team
CG visualisation and animation:
Konstantin Gromov, Eugeniy Padalkin
Video Editing: Danya Smirnov
Sound: Farhad Farzali
Konstantin Gromov, Eugeniy Padalkin
Video Editing: Danya Smirnov
Sound: Farhad Farzali