POWER THE IMAGINATION
Tashkent’s new hub for the contemporary arts centres the Silk Road city as a cultural capital.
By CATHERINE MAZY
The former depot and electricity-generating station that once powered Tashkent’s century-old tram network was far from an obvious art museum, and not only because of the diesel fumes that had permeated the walls.
Nonetheless, that was the vision for the Centre for Contemporary Arts Tashkent, a project of Uzbekistan’s Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF), which was conceived in 2017, a year after the city’s trams stopped running.
“I recognised the building’s immense potential [then],” says Gayane Umerova, chairperson of the ACDF. “It was the combination of its industrial beauty and the symbolic resonance of transforming a place that once powered the city into a space that could power cultural imagination. I knew that this was where Tashkent’s first permanent centre for contemporary arts should be housed.”
The former tram depot is centrally located on a leafy avenue near the Westminster International University campus. It is close too to the monument to Amir Temur, the great conqueror who founded the Timurid Empire which stretched across Central Asia to the Middle East and India in the 14th century.
The ACDF has been rethinking urban spaces and existing buildings with an eye for art and culture, says Dr. Sara Raza, the CCA’s artistic director and chief curator. The depot, built in 1912 in imperial style with the region’s distinctive yellow Nikolai bricks, is one of few older buildings in Tashkent. The city lies in an active seismic zone and much of it was levelled by an earthquake in 1966.
Paris-based Studio KO, which at the time had just completed the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Marrakech, was hired to give the depot a new lease on life.
Hero image, Exhibition space on the lower level of the former depot. Render: © Studio KO. Courtesy of the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF). Above, The Centre for Contemporary Arts is housed in a former tram depot and diesel station first built in 1912.
“For me, preservation was not simply an architectural decision, it was a cultural one,” Umerova says. “I chose to work with Studio KO because they embrace a philosophy of careful transformation: honouring traditional Uzbek materials and proportions while bringing the building into a new era with contemporary elements. In combining these aspects, we are allowing the building to become a space that can evolve alongside the Centre’s diverse programmes.”
“The diesel station really had the most quality,” says architect Olivier Marty, one of the partners in Studio KO. “The facade was kind of untouched. Inside was very damaged, but in a good way. It was full of fuel smells and traces which we had to clean deeply.”
Over the years, the depot had undergone changes and additions, and Studio KO had to do detective work to determine which parts were tacked on and merely copying the original style, using the wrong bricks or motifs. Clearing away the extraneous parts opened up space for a large courtyard between the depot and the smaller administrative building next door.
“We had to define the empty space in a way that it would be as interesting as the solid volumes,” Marty says. “We wanted the courtyard to be a room on its own, so that there could be events outside or animation activities. And we had to build a few workshops and studios and little technical rooms in the courtyard.” These low structures mostly hide behind curved concrete walls that on the courtyard side act as screens for an open-air cinema.
The administrative building houses staff offices, a library, and the pink-toned entrance, which leads visitors down a newly constructed staircase to a basement foyer. From here, a long, abstract corridor serves “to kind of wash your eyes and your mind,” Marty says, and leads to the exhibition space on the lower level of the former depot, which can be divided by partitions according to the exhibits.
Studio KO founders Olivier Marty and Karl Fournier. Right, Dr. Sara Raza, the CCA’s artistic director and chief curator. Photo of Studio KO by Noël Manalili; Raza Courtesy of ACDF.
An iron staircase, this one from the imperial period, leads back to the ground floor, with a collection of different spaces—high, low, enclosed, open—that remain abstract in order to accommodate changing artworks, as well as education, workshops, and community engagement. “We wanted to create many different spaces that are empty because the CCA has no permanent collection,” Marty says. “It’s really a blank canvas for shows and artists. We didn’t want the design to overwhelm the art.”
An auditorium, in the upper section of the former depot, presented a technical challenge because it is suspended from a concrete structure that is hidden inside the brick walls and reaches to the top of the facade. In the carpets and the seats of the auditorium is a deep amethyst, a colour often found in Uzbek ikats or suzani. The purple continues on the windows thanks to a UV treatment that gives them a violet hue.
The CCA’s inaugural exhibition, opening in March, is titled Hikmah, which translates to “wisdom”. Curated by Dr. Raza, it features 12 artists. “It’s not preaching anything. It’s more about material intelligence. It’s a way to bring together this wonderful project that’s taken several years to come to fruition. It’s the building. It’s the opening of the building. It’s thinking about material as an intellectual force, including the dialogue between art, architecture and ideas—a critical rethinking hikmah.”
Top, Archive of Mind, an immersive work by Korean artist Kimsooja. Above, a historical mosque undergoes restoration at the Namuna artist residency.
A large work, Flying Carpets, by Tunis-born, Berlin-based artist Nadia Kaabi-Linke will be part of Hikmah and is on loan from the Guggenheim in New York. The 20-metre suspended structure addresses themes of movement, displacement, and the state of being between cultures. One of the largest spaces will display Archive of Mind, an immersive work by Korean artist Kimsooja that invites visitors to sit at a huge table to make clay balls to the sound of running water. “It’s a beautiful, meditative gesture that thinks about hikmah,” Dr. Raza says.
Saudi artist Muhannad Shono made an outdoor work for the exhibition, to be displayed in the courtyard. Shono was an artist in residence at the CCA in May 2025, staying at one of the mahallas, or communities, that were also renovated by Studio KO as part of the CCA’s mission. One residence is in a former kindergarten while the other is a former madrasa, both near Westminster International University. “The traditional house is based on a courtyard in most of the Islamic world,” Marty says. To further tie the mahalla to the vernacular architecture, Studio KO used concrete with the typical local yellow terracotta colour.
“I hope it will be a place of inspiration, opportunity and community,” Umerova says. “In a country with over 60% of the population under 30, our focus is on building a creative economy, with opportunities to [forge] a career in the creative industries for future generations. This is why the internships, fellowships and traineeships available at the CCA, as well as the artist residency programme, are so integral to the centre.”
This building gives the CCA the space it needs to realise its ambition, she says. “A year-round programme of exhibitions, residencies, workshops, professional development, public art, and interdisciplinary events, all under one roof and in dialogue with the city around it. When the centre fully opens to the public in March, it will represent the culmination of years of vision and preparation.”
The Centre for Contemporary Arts Tashkent opens on March 21.
Hikmah runs until June 30.
