Tashkent Modernism. Index (Milano)

Today, the modernist layer of Tashkent is gaining recognition as a unique artistic, cultural and social phenomenon that is best equipped to reveal the specific character of the modernisation of Soviet Central Asia. More than just another ‘peripheral case’ of multiple modernities or a point on the global map of 20th-century architectural modernism, this architecture is relevant to the global cultural scene, reflecting the colonial, postcolonial and decolonial aspects of the Soviet social and cultural experiment.

The Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF) and the architecture studio Grace, directed by Ekaterina Golovatyuk and Giacomo Cantoni, together with Politecnico di Milano Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, represented by Andrea Gritti and Davide Del Curto, the studio Laboratorio Permanente, directed by Nicola Russi and Angelica Sylos Labini and the historian Boris Chukhovich have developed a roadmap for the preservation and adaptation of Tashkent’s modernist architecture, establishing a methodology for re-evaluating, conserving and including in the local and tourist agendas an important architectural layer of the city that was formed between the 1960s and the 1980s.

The exhibition at Triennale is a condensed preview of two years of research that is part of the Tashkent. Modernism XX/XXI project and consists of two interwoven layers: photographs by Armin Linke and archival documentation translated onto large boards showing the research themes and elements of the preservation strategies.

Armin Linke’s work avoids the clichés formed in the last 15 years by publications on Soviet and East European modernism, whereby modernist buildings are glorified as remnants of an exotic, remote and extinguished culture. Rather than immortalising the passing beauty of Tashkent architecture, his photographs aim to highlight its contemporary value, at times intrinsic and at times acquired. His images also reveal another important quality, crucial to his work: this architecture, with its sculptural volumes and elaborate surfaces, is the scenography for staging the larger social scripts.

The archive panels, designed as pin boards, include fragments of the research, analytical and preservation materials. Rather than focus on a specific building, they articulate key themes for the understanding of Soviet modernism: the relationship between the ‘centre’ and the ‘periphery’, the role of institutions, typological, technological and material experimentation, the competition between republics, ideology, orientalism, post-independence transformations and the contemporary condition. The archive also includes materials setting out the repertoire of preservation strategies that were developed specifically for Tashkent.