_BIOGRAPHY Gayane Umerova is leading the cultural transformation of Uzbekistan. As Chairperson of the Art and Culture Development Foundation under the Cabinet of Ministers, she has reshaped the nation's creative voice on the world stage — from launching the inaugural Bukhara Biennial to landmark presentations at the Venice Biennale and a major exhibition at the British Museum. Her work positions Uzbekistan not only as a destination for investment, but for culture.

“WE ARE NOT ASKING THE WORLD TO ADMIRE WHAT WE HAVE PRESERVED. WE ARE INVITING IT TO PARTICIPATE IN WHAT WE ARE CREATING.”

BUKHARA BIENNIAL DREW 1.8 MILLION VISITORS IN AUTUMN 2025; ARAL CULTURE SUMMIT TURNED ENVIRONMENTAL WOUND INTO GLOBAL CONVERSATION. WHAT DOES THIS SCALE TELL YOU ABOUT APPETITE FOR UZBEKISTAN'S CREATIVE ECONOMY?

It confirms something I have believed for a long time, and that the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan has consistently championed as a strategic priority: culture is not peripheral to national development, it is central to it. The Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF) exists precisely to translate that presidential vision into concrete, lasting reality, and the response we have witnessed over the past year is evidence that this conviction is shared far beyond our borders.

What the numbers tell us is that there is a genuine, broad, and growing appetite for what Uzbekistan has to offer, and that it extends well beyond specialist or heritage audiences. The 1.8 million people we welcomed to the Bukhara Biennial represented extraordinary diversity: strong local communities engaging with their own artistic inheritance, regional visitors discovering Uzbekistan's creative present for the first time, and an increasingly significant international audience that arrived with serious expectations and left with a deeper understanding of what this country is building. That combination, cultural identity, regional relevance, and global credibility, is precisely what a sustainable creative economy requires.

The Aral Culture Summit demonstrated something equally important: that culture is not merely a vehicle for celebration, but a framework for confronting the most difficult realities a society faces. Transforming one of the world's most visible environmental tragedies into a platform for cultural reflection and international dialogue required both courage and clarity of purpose. The response confirmed that audiences everywhere are ready for that kind of ambition. We added more initiatives on the Aral region with the Aral School (launched in January 2026) and the themes of our presence at Milan Design Week and Venice Biennale this year prolong our commitment to this region.

We witnessed the same depth of interest at Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, where the Uzbekistan Pavilion welcomed one million visitors. These are not isolated moments. They are signals of sustained, compound interest in what Uzbekistan represents — and they raise the bar considerably for what we must now deliver.

​

TADAO ANDO, STUDIO KO, AND WILMOTTE ARE DESIGNING MAJOR UZBEK CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS. HOW DO YOU CHOOSE ARCHITECTURAL PARTNERS, AND WHAT MUST THESE BUILDINGS DELIVER?

The selection of architectural partners is never about prestige for its own sake. It is about finding architects whose thinking is genuinely aligned with what we are trying to build institutions that serve artists, engage communities, and endure across generations. That is a demanding brief, and it requires partners who listen before they design.

What Tadao Ando, Studio KO, and Wilmotte & Associés share, despite their very different practices, is a profound respect for context and a willingness to subordinate signature to purpose. When Ando approaches the National Museum of Uzbekistan, he brings a discipline of silence and material honesty that creates the conditions for the works inside to breathe and be encountered seriously. Studio KO brings a sensitivity to craft and locality that is directly relevant to what the Center for Contemporary Arts in Tashkent needs to embody. Wilmotte's masterplanning of the Bukhara cultural district allowed us to think at an urban scale not just about individual buildings, but about how culture becomes woven into the fabric of a city.

In their first decade, these buildings must earn the trust of the artists, curators, and audiences they serve. That means being genuinely useful: offering production facilities that artists can actually work in, exhibition spaces that allow experimentation, and public thresholds that feel genuinely open. They must be active places, not monuments. If they are embedded in the daily life of the city — if artists choose to return to them because they are productive and inspiring — then they will have fulfilled their purpose. The architecture sets the conditions; what happens inside will define the legacy.

​

SINCE 2021 YOU'VE COMMISSIONED VENICE PAVILIONS, SILK ROADS AT BRITISH MUSEUM, MILAN DESIGN WEEK, EXPO OSAKA. WALK US THROUGH THIS STRATEGY AND WHERE IT POINTS NEXT.

The strategy is cumulative and deliberate. Each project has been designed to accomplish something specific within a larger architecture of positioning. Some have been focused primarily on developing the next generation of Uzbek artists and curators, giving them access to international platforms and the institutional relationships that come with them. Others have been oriented toward building long-term partnerships with major cultural institutions. Others still have been about reaching entirely new audiences and demonstrating that Uzbekistan's creative contribution is not defined by any single discipline or historical period.

Together, these projects create the continuity that allows Uzbekistan to be understood as a consistent, serious, and evolving presence in global cultural conversation, not a novelty, but a participant. That distinction matters enormously, because credibility in the international cultural world is built slowly and lost quickly.

What this sequence points toward is a phase in which Uzbekistan moves from being introduced to being a genuine initiator, hosting, convening, and setting terms of dialogue rather than simply responding to external frameworks. The infrastructure we are building domestically, combined with the international relationships we have developed, positions us to do exactly that in the years ahead.

SAMARKAND HOSTED THE 43RD UNESCO GENERAL CONFERENCE IN NOVEMBER 2025. WHAT DID THAT UNLOCK FOR CULTURAL DIPLOMACY, AND HOW DOES IT INTERACT WITH UZBEKISTAN 2030?

Hosting the UNESCO General Conference in Samarkand was a moment of genuine historic significance, not simply as a point of pride, but as a strategic inflection point for Uzbekistan's role in shaping global cultural policy. It was a direct expression of the President's conviction that Uzbekistan must not only preserve its extraordinary heritage but actively contribute to the international frameworks through which culture is governed, funded, and protected. ACDF's work is one of the primary instruments through which that vision is being implemented.

What the decision unlocked, concretely, was access: access to networks that previously required years of diplomatic cultivation, access to multilateral partnerships that will have long-term institutional consequences, and access to a level of policy dialogue that allows Uzbekistan to help define the agenda rather than simply respond to it. Holding that conference in Central Asia for the first time sent a clear signal that the region's voice matters in global cultural governance.

​

The connection to Uzbekistan 2030 is not incidental, it is structural. Culture, under the President's reform framework, is not a soft complement to economic development; it is one of its primary drivers. The reform agenda recognises that a country with Uzbekistan's heritage, creativity, and human capital can generate significant economic value through cultural industries, creative exports, and the kind of international reputation that attracts investment across every sector. The UNESCO moment reinforced all of that, and it gave us new tools to advance it.

BUKHARA BIENNIAL PAIRED ARTISANS WITH INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS. WHAT WILL YOU ADD FOR THE 2027 EDITION? HOW DOES THE FOUNDATION TRANSLATE VISIBILITY INTO LIVELIHOODS?

Visibility is the beginning, not the outcome. The real measure of what we are building is whether the attention generated by events like the Biennial translates into durable professional lives for Uzbek artisans, curators, and designers, and that requires a fundamentally different kind of investment than producing a successful exhibition.

At the Biennial, the pairing of master artisans with international artists was structured as a genuine working process not decorative collaboration, but a real exchange of techniques, methodologies, and ways of understanding material and form. That process had value in itself, yet its deeper purpose was to build relationships, skills, and confidence that would outlast the event. Looking ahead to the next edition, we established an advisory board (with recognised professionals like Chris Dercon, Fondation Cartier, Michael Govan, LACMA, Alberto Cavalli, Michelangelo Foundation and more) and opened pathways to international platforms, institutions, and collectors that would otherwise take decades to access. With Kulapat Yantrasast joining as Creative Director, we believe the next edition will once again offer visitors a surprising new approach to interdisciplinary installation.

But institutional connections alone are not sufficient. We are investing seriously in training and capacity building, in production infrastructure that allows craftspeople and designers to work at international standards, and in the market access and distribution channels that allow their work to circulate globally on sustainable terms. Culture, alongside tourism, is one of the most powerful levers available to us for economic development and direct job creation — and the craft and creative industries are particularly important in this regard because they generate employment across entire regions, not only in capital cities. Our ambition is that the next generation of Uzbek creative talent does not depend on a single moment of international exposure but rather builds careers embedded in a functioning, self-reinforcing creative economy.

A FINAL WORD TO INTERNATIONAL INVESTORS INTERESTED IN UZBEKISTAN. MANY OF THEM HAVE NEVER TRAVELLED TO BUKHARA, KHIVA, OR TASHKENT. WHAT IS THE SINGLE INVITATION YOU EXTEND TO THEM IN 2026?

My invitation is direct: come, spend time here, and witness at first-hand what happens when a country with one of the world's great civilisational inheritances decides, with presidential commitment and institutional resolve, to bring that heritage into dynamic dialogue with the present.Uzbekistan offers something rare in today's world, a foundation of extraordinary depth and a moment of genuine transformation. Cities like Bukhara, Samarkand, and Khiva have been centres of knowledge, craft, commerce, and exchange for centuries. That is not a marketing claim; it is a historical fact that shapes everything from our architecture to our artisanal traditions to our capacity for cross-cultural exchange. But what makes this specific moment compelling for investors is that this heritage is being actively and intelligently re-engaged with, not as a museum piece, but as a living resource for innovation, creativity, and economic value.

Under the President's vision, culture has been established as one of the crucial assets for the country's development. The Arts and Culture Development Foundation is the instrument through which that vision is being built into institutions, programmes, and opportunities that will serve Uzbekistan for generations. We are not asking the world to admire what we have preserved. We are inviting it to participate in what we are creating.

For investors, that combination, deep foundation, clear direction, presidential commitment, and a creative economy that is already generating measurable results, represents exactly the kind of proposition that rewards early, serious engagement. The question is not whether Uzbekistan belongs in global cultural and economic conversations. It already does. The question is whether you will be part of writing that chapter.