Over the past few years, a quiet but decisive shift has been unfolding in the geography of the global art market. As traditional centres of cultural power in Europe and the United States contend with saturation, new regions are emerging with confidence, vision and funding. Among them, Central Asia and the Caucasus have become unlikely but potent frontiers. Here, the forces of history, private wealth, and cultural diplomacy are converging to create a new kind of art ecosystem—one that blends heritage with ambition, and local traditions with international reach. Collectors, curators, and institutions are reimagining what it means to participate in the global conversation from places once considered the periphery.
The inaugural Bukhara Biennial, running this autumn under the poetic title Recipes for Broken Hearts, captures this transformation vividly. Spread across restored madrasas and courtyards, the biennial brings together international artists and Uzbek craftspeople, blurring the distinction between art, architecture, and ritual. The city itself becomes a medium—its tiled domes and narrow lanes framing contemporary installations that speak to continuity rather than rupture. For Uzbekistan, the biennial is more than a cultural event: it is a statement of belonging on the global stage, and of pride in the local imagination. Visitors encounter not a polished export of “Central Asian art,” but a living, breathing sense of place.
If Bukhara represents a state-backed gesture of soft power, Almaty exemplifies the private initiative driving much of the region’s artistic renewal. Two major new museums have just opened there, both privately funded yet publicly minded. The Almaty Museum of Arts (AMA), founded by collector Nurlan Smagulov, houses hundreds of works from Kazakhstan and its neighbours, presented in a gleaming building that gestures toward the mountains beyond. Across town, the Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture occupies a restored Soviet cinema, redesigned by British architect Asif Khan. Its dynamic programme of exhibitions, performances, and talks gives Almaty the kind of contemporary platform long missing from the region. For a generation of Kazakh artists, this represents not just space but legitimacy—a sign that their work belongs within an international conversation.
Further west, in Tbilisi, Shalva Breus is building a museum to house a growing collection of Georgian and international modern and contemporary art. Still under construction, it already carries symbolic weight: a statement of confidence from a country whose cultural scene has often thrived in the shadows of larger neighbours. Breus’s project joins a broader wave of private patronage across the region, where collectors are stepping into roles once reserved for the state. Together, these new museums form an emerging network that could, in time, reshape the cultural map of the post-Soviet world.
This renewal is not limited to new buildings—it is also a rediscovery of art history itself. The extraordinary collection of Russian avant-garde art at the Nukus Museum in Karakalpakstan—long a legend among specialists in the subject —has returned to international prominence. Following its celebrated showing at the 2024 Venice Biennale, discussions are underway to send further parts of the collection abroad. The story of Nukus, where banned or neglected art works found sanctury in the Uzbek desert, feels almost mythical today. It repositions Central Asia not as a backdrop to Russian modernism, but as one of its vital sources—a place where the greatest examples of artistic experimentation survived political repression and geographic isolation.
That rediscovery finds an uncanny echo in the historical literature that once shaped the Western imagination of the region. In the 19th century many intrepid travellers from Europe ventured East to Russia and beyond, publishing their accounts in books which piqued the public’s curiosity in other cultures like Leitch Ritchie’s Voyage Pittoresque, Curieux et Intéressant en Russie a richly illustrated travelogue published in 1846 that delighted nineteenth-century European readers with visions of Russia’s “Oriental” frontier. Ritchie’s descriptions of Samarkand and the steppes—filtered through equal parts wonder and misunderstanding—offer a revealing mirror to today’s global curiosity. Where Ritchie’s travellers approached Central Asia as an exotic landscape to be decoded, the artists of the Bukhara Biennial invite viewers to see it from within.
Russian artist Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin’s own writings on Samarkand, published in the Soviet period, form a poetic bridge between historical eras. His 1921 journey to Central Asia transformed not only his palette but his philosophy of art. The resulting works—most notably his Samarkand series—are steeped in the city’s light and geometry, turning the blue domes and ochre courtyards of Uzbekistan into modern icons. Petrov-Vodkin’s reflections, when placed alongside the ancient manuscripts and travel diaries in your collection, reveal how art and travel have long been intertwined in this part of the world: the eye of the traveller and the eye of the artist as two halves of the same curiosity.
The renewed interest in such cross-cultural histories has market consequences. With Russian collectors constrained by sanctions, attention and capital have shifted naturally toward the Caucasus and Central Asia. Wealthy patrons in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Georgia are busy on the international stage, networking, acquiring works and building institutions. As a result, art associated with these regions has become increasingly sought after—whether by Armenian and Georgian masters like Martiros Saryan and Lado Gudiashvili, by Uzbek avant-garde painter Alexander Volkov, or by Russian artists such as Alexander Yakovlev, who travelled through the region in the early twentieth century. What was once considered marginal or ethnographic now stands as an important chapter in the story of 20th century modernism.
This evolution is mixed in with initiatives in London with a substantial diaspora and international collector base which has long attracted contemporary artists from the region, and sold historical works by artists from Central Asia and the Caucasus in the Russian auctions. Sotheby’s “At the Crossroads” exhibitions a decade ago introduced many Western audiences to this art for the first time, while the Saatchi Gallery gave prominence to Russian- Azeri artist Aidan Salakhova and Georgian Zurab Tsereteli. Yet what distinguishes the current moment is that the energy is flowing homeward. The collectors who once may have staged exhibitions in London are now building museums in Almaty and Tbilisi; the curators who once looked westwards are now engaging with the local scene with biennials and residencies.
Meanwhile, in Uzbekistan, state policy has recognised the strategic value of culture. New public funds are supporting contemporary artists, while international exhibitions are reintroducing Uzbek collections to global audiences. In Russia, the “Light Between Worlds” exhibition in Istra—bringing together works from two major Uzbek museums—serves as both historical bridge and symbolic gesture. The state’s backing of the Bukhara Biennial further underscores how art and diplomacy now move in tandem.
For the global art market, this convergence of cultural rediscovery and financial freedom represents both promise and complexity. There is genuine curiosity about the art histories of these regions, but also the temptation to simplify—to turn the depth of their traditions into marketable narratives of “rediscovery.” The challenge for new institutions will be to balance international visibility with local resonance, to ensure that art serves as a bridge rather than an export.
Still, it is hard not to feel excitement. After decades in which the art of Central Asia and the Caucasus was subsumed under the Soviet label or ignored altogether, the region is asserting its own voice. The biennial in Bukhara, the museums in Almaty and (in future) Tbilisi, the renewed fascination with Nukus—all signal a tectonic cultural awakening. The same roads that once carried merchants and manuscripts across the steppe are alive again—only now, they carry art.
