The Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF) has announced the artistic team for the country’s pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, marking its third participation in the event. Titled “The Aural Sea,” the exhibition will feature seven artists—Jahongir Bobokulov, Zi Kakhramonova, Aygul Sarsen, Zulfiya Spowart, Xin Liu, A.A.Murakami, and Nguyen Phuong Linh—whose multimedia works will center on the environmental degradation of the Aral Sea basin in Central Asia.

The presentation will be curated by the inaugural cohort of the Bukhara Biennial Curatorial School’s annual program: Sophie Mayuko Arni, Aziza Izamova, Kamila Mukhitdinova, Nico Sun, and Thái Hà. Inspired by the writings of Karakalpak author Allayar Darmenov, which delve into the Soviet legacy of resource exploitation in the Aral Sea, the paintings, textiles, and installations on view will engage with mythmaking and storytelling as a restorative way to process ecological grief and imagine an alternative future for the region. The pavilion will focus in particular on Karakalpakstan, where the southern part of the inland salt lake has largely dried up due to mass irrigation projects in the 1960s.

ACDF chairperson Gayane Umerova stated in a press release: “By bringing together diverse voices, this pavilion creates a space for exchange between disciplines, between generations, and between different ways of knowing what it means to live with ecological change.” The curatorial team added that the exhibition “understands imagination not as escape, but as agency—one that allows artists to work through transformation and possibility.”

“The Aural Sea” will run from May 9 to November 22.

Aisha Traub Chan is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.