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.

The Pavilion’s curatorial team, Sophie Mayuko Arni (b. 1995, Switzerland), Aziza Izamova (b. 1997, Uzbekistan), Kamila Mukhitdinova (b. 2003, Uzbekistan), Nico Sun (b. 1998, China), and Thái Hà (b. 1996, Vietnam), was formed through the Bukhara Biennial Curatorial School, an ACDF initiative commissioned by Gayane Umerova and led by the inaugural Bukhara Biennial Artistic Director Diana Campbell. Working collectively, they approach the Aral Sea through mythmaking and storytelling, treating imagination as a tool for thinking through environmental change.

Working across installation, interactive work, and painting, the pavilion artists Jahongir Bobokulov (b. 1996, Uzbekistan), Zi Kakhramonova (b. 2001, Uzbekistan), Aygul Sarsen (b. 2005, Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan), Zulfiya Spowart (b. 1991, Uzbekistan),Xin Liu (b. 1991, China), A.A.Murakami (b. 1983, United Kingdom and b. 1984, Japan), and Nguyen Phuong Linh (b. 1985, Vietnam) bring practices that range from scientific modelling to folkloric imagination, from monumental textile to intimate craft. Together, the artists approach the Aral not as a problem to be solved but as a site of knowledge.