Tashkent’s new art centre will put Uzbekistan on the global cultural map

Uzbekistan has no lack of cultural assets of all sorts of vintages, from Timurid-era mosques to a Soviet Metro, and it is adding to this impressive slate at a brisk pace lately. The inaugural edition of the Bukhara Biennial, featuring artists from Antony Gormley to Wael Shawky, launched in September (and is open till late November). Lina Gotmeh is renovating a historic home into the Jadids' Legacy Museum in that city. Ground was recently broken for Tadao Ando’s National Museum of Uzbekistan in Tashkent. And more imminently, Tashkent’s Centre for Contemporary Arts, designed by Paris-based Studio KO, will open in March, the first institution of its kind in Central Asia.

Explore CCA Tashkent, the Uzbek capital's newest cultural hub

Sara Raza, its artistic director and chief curator, arrives from prior intervals at the Guggenheim Museum, Tate Modern, and much else. The CCA Tashkent, spearheaded by the ACDF and its chairperson, Gayane Umerova, will serve as a centre for exhibitions, education, and research. It, she explained, 'is site-specific and rooted in the unique topography of the city of Tashkent, which has been an important hub for visual cultures from antiquity to the modern and contemporary periods. For me, the artistic vision is about rethinking Tashkent’s role as a centre of soft power in the 20th century, drawing on its rich history in cinema, literature, and its deep engagement with the Global South.'

These links are not merely overland; Raza recounted more distant cultural links, such as the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conferences from the 1950s to 1980s and the Tashkent Film Festival within a similar span. The Centre aims to serve the 'local, but also the local within a global context, and celebrate and centre artists as part of this exploration.'

Uzbekistan is the most populous of the Central Asian States. Its capital, Tashkent, is also the largest city in the region (it was the fourth-largest in the Soviet Union in 1989). Its character is that of an ancient city to which an imperial radial city was appended. There remain some ornate 16th-century mosques and madrassahs; although the city’s building stock has suffered from earthquakes, most dramatically and destructively in 1966.

The rebuilding was something of a Brezhnev-era demonstration project and resulted in a bounty of striking Soviet Modern structures built subsequently, replete with mosaics, murals, and reliefs (its metro is hugely impressive due to such station adornments). These have become increasingly a focus of preservation attention. All sorts of artistic traditions have remained robust; a number of the most impressive works at the Bukhara Biennial were local ceramic or textile works, frequently combining traditional craft and contemporary conceptual elements.

The CCA Tashkent straddles two eras of the city's history in its dual locations. The Centre itself is under construction in a relatively rare Tsarist relic in the city centre, a former tram station and diesel power hall designed in 1912 by Wilhelm Heinzelmann (a few of whose other designs survive in the city centre, including the former Romanov Grand Duke’s residence). Artists' residences are located in a historic 19th-century madrassah and mosque, and a former kindergarten nearby in yet older neighbourhoods.

Studio KO encountered a site that was cluttered with undistinguished later buildings; the diesel hall was literally coated in black grease, residue of its prior use. The scent of this past was powerful. Yet they found a sturdy relic in the former power hall. Olivier Marty, co-founder of Studio KO, explained, 'It has many features that are typical of Imperial architecture throughout the region. It’s using brick as the main module to create ornament. It is very Russian, but it also has a little something of Central Asia because Central Asia is all about making motifs with brick.' They were taken by the interior. Marty explained, 'It’s like a cathedral - there’s a very spiritual quality to it.' Their task was to accentuate this grandeur.

Marty said, 'The first part was almost archaeology. Just think of the existing premises, what do you do to revive it? So it's like finding a composition that is wrong. You want to make it right again, so you decide what to remove.' There were a number of later buildings that they demolished, retaining the power hall and the lower floors of an administration building, the sole structures that dated from 1912.

Artists’ residences were initially envisioned on site, but they found this a bit too congested a program, as they were intent on retaining space around the diesel hall in a neighbourhood that is otherwise dense with taller buildings. Marty said, 'In the middle, we created empty space. The void is as important as the two solid buildings; it’s about the relationship.'

The diesel station was actually in considerably good shape; its ornamental bricks were restored, and some structural elements replaced (in fair part to support a sort of suspended performance pod within). New windows are of shocking transparency, featuring a violet filter visible outside but not in.

The hall’s main entrance is oriented away from the street entrance, which posed a question of how to orchestrate the broader site. They arrived upon a novel solution which accentuates the scale of the diesel hall, namely by creating an entrance sequence through the administration building, which then proceeds down via circular stairs or elevator to galleries tunnelled to then provide an initial basement view of the hall’s height. Marty explained. 'We wanted nothing to spoil the appearance of this beautiful building; the only way to do it was through the basement.'

Practical functions of ticketing, logistics, and a library are housed in the administration building, Marty said, 'enabling us to keep the diesel station as a perfect, empty space.' They also sought contrast and complement in material and form, confronting the question, as Marty indicated 'Old and new? How do they converse with one another? How do they slide within one another?' They literally slid a new self-supporting concrete building into the footprint of the former administration building, clipping off brick at one corner to make clear what they were up to, which Marty referred to both as 'facadisme' and a hearty 'lipstick' of brick.

There’s an addition to the administration structure built of the same poured concrete, about whose character they were quite particular. They were fascinated by local aggregate, which, Marty explained, 'has very dark stones: dark greys, dark reds, dark yellows.' They are, he said, 'almost too strong to be exposed,' but that’s exactly what they chose to do, in order that 'the modularity of the brick and the colour of the brick could be matched by a very abstract concrete.'

Contrast in form to rectilinear buildings will also be provided by an expressive 'comma', Marty explained: a curved concrete wall within the courtyard, derived from the sense that the space needed some final punctuation to draw it together. Marty invoked 'the power of a curve; there’s something magical about the perfect proportions of a circle' and they built a portion of one to provide gentle shape to the Centre’s courtyard.

Studio KO’s work at the residencies displayed a similar balance of interests. The main frame is existing structures; deep brick and heavily vaulted rooms surrounding a courtyard lined by a small mosque. This contains an intriguing assortment of relics of past intervals of décor, and is being used as an exhibition space. The inaugural cohort of residents is at work currently. They inserted a rather Miesian narrow two-floor workshop screened off by a wall from the view of the residencies.

Raza explained the CCA’s aim as complementary to that of the National Museum. The latter provides an encyclopedic accounting of past national art, and the former looks to the present, in a wide variety of forms. She described it as 'akin to a Kunst Halle, a non-collecting institution that invests in current thinking about art and ideas, but also expands to include other disciplines such as music, dance, and technologies.' Its opening exhibit, Hikmah, the Uzbek term for wisdom, will feature an assortment of Uzbek and international artists.

Marty welcomed the idea of this brief of potentiality. 'There is no proper collection; a combination of artists and characters and personalities will give meaning to the building.'