Curatorial Architecture

For the first edition of the Bukhara Biennial in 2025, commissioned by Gayane Umerova and curated by Diana Campbell, we were commissioned for the curatorial architecture, designing the spatial framework that adapts heritage sites to the public, connects artworks in dialogue, enables safe direct immersive encounters, and supports artists in achieving large scale artworks.

The 2025 Bukhara Biennial, Recipes for Broken Hearts, transformed the historic city into a living exhibition across mosques, madrasas, caravanserais, and streets. Our work with Diana Campbell set Bukhara to act as host rather than backdrop. We tuned approaches, thresholds, places to rest, and places to learn, so people could move with ease, meet art up close, and feel welcome to stay. The aim was simple: immersion without risk, dialogue without hierarchy, and clear credit to the many hands involved.

Curatorial Architecture is not a style but a new field at the intersection of exhibition design, public space, and artistic mediation developed through a half-decade-long collaboration with Curator Diana Campbell . It is a way of hosting relations between artworks, places, and publics with enough precision for heritage sites and enough softness for everyday use.

In Bukhara, that meant designing frames you can walk, sit, learn, and return through. When the frame is exact and generous, art does not sit apart from civic life. It becomes part of the route people take through their day.

Across the Biennial we kept three rules. Proximity: keep the public close to the work, add distance only when care or safety requires it. Dialogue: plan for coexistence, not one upmanship, so works, sites, and people can speak to each other. Credit: name and support the makers, engineers, and stewards who carry the work forward after the opening.

Khoja Kalon Mosque ensemble

At the Khoja Kalon Mosque complex, we built a ramp to stitch several commissions into one shared path. Visitors rise along a gentle quiet line. Delcy Morelos presents a field of earth and scent. Antony Gormley’s Close stands as a body of hand formed elements. Dunes by Ruben Saakyan with biologist Konstantin Lazarev shelter a strip of living plants. Overhead, Jazgul Madazimova’s wave of women’s scarves forms a floating spine that meets the public as they ascend. The ramp is the mediator; instead of separating the public from the work, it eases them into it. Circulation becomes a curatorial tool. Coexistence feels natural rather than forced.

Broken Hearts Bazaar

We created an entrance as a spice market and a family of conical info point kiosks across the Old City. Guided by scent, touch, and simple cues, these structures welcomed people before they saw architecture. They echoed Uzbek spice displays and pitched rural roofs, offered clear information and moments of rest, and were built for easy transport so they can be donated to local communities after the Biennial.

Laila Gohar, Navat Uy

Together with Food Artist Laila and local artisan Ilkhom Shoyimkulov, we helped realize a house-pavilion crystallized in navat, rock sugar, over a light armature. It was playful and precise, grounded in Bukhara’s sweets tradition. While most discovered it with their eyes, children and wasps were happy to experience it with their tongs. 

Caravanserai bench

In the Caravanserai site, following the enlighted suggestion of curator Diana Campbell replaced railings with a continuous bench that worked as seat, stage, and lookout. Performers used it for music. The public used it to rest and to view nearby works. A barrier turned into a place.

Sara Ouhaddou, wall work

With Sara Ouhaddou, we supported a wall piece that draws on local metalwork used on everyday doors. The craft moved from domestic detail to civic scale, and the city read itself in the work.