Uzbekistan Pavilion 2026: The Aural Sea

The Aural Sea engages the Aral Sea region of Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan through mythmaking and storytelling as ways of responding to environmental transformation.

Since the 1960s, the large-scale diversion of the region’s rivers for agricultural irrigation has caused the Aral Sea to lose over 90 percent of its volume, turning one of the world’s largest inland lakes into desert. Against this backdrop, the exhibition considers the Aral Sea as a site for climate resilience and alternative futures. Curated by Sophie Mayuko Arni, Kamila Mukhitdinova, Nico Sun, Thái Hà and Aziza Izamova—the inaugural cohort of the Bukhara Biennial Curatorial School, an initiative of ACDF—the Pavilion brings together artists Jahongir Bobokulov, Zi Kakhramonova, Aygul Sarsen, Zulfiya Spowart, Xin Liu, A.A.Murakami, and Nguyen Phuong Linh. Working across installation, interactive work, and painting, the artists engage their ecological imaginations to learn with and from the Aral Sea. The exhibition draws inspiration from the Uzbek-Karakalpak author Allayar Darmenov, whose writings imagined a replenished Aral region through fiction and fantasy. Following this approach, The Aural Sea 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. Responding to the 61st Biennale’s theme In Minor Keys , the Pavilion’s title signals its method: listening. The exhibition considers what it means to hear a landscape that has undergone dramatic transformation, and what might be learned from attending to voices shaped by that experience. The Pavilion draws on ACDF’s sustained engagement with the Aral Sea region through its wider educational and cultural initiatives. These include the Aral Culture Summit, a transdisciplinary platform convening artists, scientists, and policymakers, and the Aral School, an interdisciplinary postgraduate programme based in Nukus dedicated to ecological and social regeneration.

What to expect:
Performance / Live Art, Installation, Painting