The Works That Waited: Uzbek Artist Vyacheslav Akhunov in Venice
Central Asia has made a striking impression at this year’s Venice Biennale. At the 61st International Art Exhibition, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan have each claimed visible space through national pavilions that speak to different realities: environmental devastation, shifting cultural identity, memory, and the long afterlife of Soviet power. The national pavilions are essential viewing for art lovers. During the Biennale, Venice also fills with officially recognized exhibitions outside the main venues and national pavilions. Known as Collateral Events, these shows are staged across the city in palaces, churches, foundations, and museums. Among the most compelling this season is “Instruments of the Mind” by Uzbek artist Vyacheslav Akhunov. Housed in the Neo-Gothic rooms of Palazzo Franchetti on the Grand Canal, the exhibition surveys decades of his career. Widely regarded as one of Central Asia’s most significant conceptual artists, Akhunov has developed a rigorous and wide-ranging practice since the 1970s. He has worked across drawing, text, installation, collage, and performance. The exhibition spans five decades but avoids a conventional chronological structure. Instead, it centers on the unrealized, foregrounding censorship, bureaucratic delay, and the near-total lack of institutional support in Uzbekistan that prevented many of Akhunov’s projects from being fully realized for decades. That emphasis also points to a wider shift. It shows the distance between the conditions under which Akhunov worked for much of his career and the significant cultural investment Uzbekistan is making today, particularly in contemporary art. As a result, several works conceived as drawings in the 1970s and kept in studio drawers ever since are presented here as full-scale installations for the first time. This fine-tuned curation presents the work of a seminal artist while also reflecting on the evolution of a country’s cultural landscape. The exhibition is curated by Sara Raza, Chief Curator and Artistic Director of the Centre for Contemporary Arts Tashkent, one of the leading authorities on the region’s contemporary art development. “Instruments of the Mind is not about the past,” Akhunov has said. “It is about how thought survives.” The exhibition takes its title from a deconstructed reading of the Sanskrit word mantra, from manas, meaning mind, and tra, meaning tool. Language is positioned here as an instrument of consciousness. The show’s range is wider than that etymology suggests. It moves between introspection and absurdity, spiritual devotion and political satire, the intimate and the monumental. Mantras for Art Palazzo Franchetti, a striking building with a marble staircase, intricate floral decorations, and frescoed ceilings, welcomes visitors with a work that functions as a rite of passage. “Triumphal Arch” (1979/2026) transforms the entrance corridor into a tunnel covered with hundreds of real scissors: household scissors, surgical clamps, nail scissors, ribbon-cutting shears, chrome-plated and painted, tiny and oversized, all fixed to the wall. To enter the show, visitors must walk through this bristling passage. The work originates from a 1979 drawing. Its conceptual target is the grandiose Soviet ribbon-cutting ceremony, a televised ritual performed at the inauguration of projects that often went unfinished or were c trapped in...
