With the opening of several new large scale art initiatives in Central Asia, including the Almaty Museum of Arts, the Tselinny Centre of Contemporary Culture, and in Uzbekistan the new Bukhara Biennale, is this the moment when these formerly peripheral and regional art scenes become truly international?

Last autumn, the international art community converged on Bukhara, a city that more than lived up to its 2,500-year history as a trading post between East and West. Soon after, major announcements followed: not one but two new contemporary art institutions were set to open in Kazakhstan. The Almaty Museum of Arts, designed by the British architectural practice Chapman Taylor, places local artists in dialogue with international counterparts. Meanwhile, the Tselinny Centre, conceived by British architect Asif Khan, is the transformation of a former Soviet-era cinema into a dynamic hub for contemporary art from across the region, alongside multidisciplinary performances and experimental practices. The ambition is unmistakable — the bar is being set extraordinarily high. Across the Caspian Sea, in Tbilisi, art collector and philanthropist Shalva Breus is equally determined, having acquired a former hospital building in the city centre to establish a new museum. It is an undertaking of considerable scale and vision.

Where once state funding supported the many art scenes across the Soviet Union, today the biggest developments in the fields of art and culture are private ventures. Most countries throughout the Caucasus and Central Asia do not have a museum of contemporary art and decades on from the dissolution of the Soviet Union of Arts and the unshackling from the yoke of Soviet Realism, there is a lack of local governmental support for artists today living across the regions. To support art initiatives on the scale of a state, which is necessary to educate, support and foster the art scenes as well as art collecting, the kind of funding needed is as vast as the Kazakh steppe, Nurlan Smagulov and Kairat Boranbayev have very deep pockets.

I first visited the Caucasus and Central Asia over a decade ago when there were very few local galleries and only a handful of aspirational collectors on the ground. In comparison to diaspora collectors from the region who had been living in Moscow for decades or were settling in London and exploring more cosmopolitan tastes, there was a void. It was very different to when Russian collecting opened up in the early 1990s where new Russian collectors had a legacy to fall back on - even in the Soviet times there had been passionate art collectors albeit underground. Nevertheless, I was excited by the art that I saw there, non-conformist paintings by Tofik Javadov (1925-1963), sharp conceptual works by multimedia Uzbek artist Vyacheslav Akhunov (b.1948), or the raw epic landscapes of Armenia by Hakob Hakobyan (1923-2013), who I was fortunate to meet in his studio not long before he passed away (and whose work today still barely fetches over £10,000). And there were many new artists such as Almagul Menlibayeva (b.1969) who had already spent time studying or establishing studio practices in the West, and whose work had an international language.

This was when I was working at Sotheby’s and at the time there was no secondary auction market for these artists, so in 2013 we decided to organise a selling exhibition which we called ‘At The Crossroads’ and together with Azeri-born Suad Garayeva we made a list of artists that interested us, and after travelling to the region, selected works to show in London. The event generated a lot of excitement on the ground, mostly probably because of the novelty, and even better we made some reasonable sales, and by finding a buyer for a portrait of Shostakovich painted in 1987 by Tair Salakhov (1928-2021) we more than covered our expenses, it was a success. We carried on with a second event a few years later and joined forces with our Turkish colleagues to expand the regional scope, but not long after this corporate strategy shifted within Sotheby’s and selling exhibitions were axed. Had there been more solid sales or collectors from the region, it may have endured, but fostering new markets takes time and patience and significant investment. Although it was short-lived, we had managed to introduce dozens of new artists to the international art market like Georgian painter Merab Abramishvili (1957-2006). The interest in his work by international collectors who saw it in our selling exhibition was such that we were confident enough to place a painting at auction, which we did that Autumn and today his work continues to be sought after both in Georgia and abroad. His record price at auction was set at Bonhams in London in 2023 for his ‘Black Panther’, a quintessential tempera in gesso painting which fetched £76,600. And a few years after the Crossroads selling exhibition we set a record price for Tair Salakhov at auction for a painting of his daughter Aidan on a rocking horse which sold for £269,000.

A decade on and I can feel how much has changed for the better, although it is hard to put a figure on this evolution in economic terms because the market for artists in the region is not established at auction. There are many more art galleries on the ground in the major capital cities across the region from Baku to Astana, and more artists from the regions are represented by international galleries like Slavs and Tatars who are represented by Tanya Bonakdar in New York as well as Raster in Warsaw and The Third Line in Dubai, and Tamara Kvesitadze who is represented by Kornfield Galerie Berlin. In recent years there have been a few dedicated online auctions at Bonhams in London, first with Georgian and Azerbaijani art in 2023 and last year an auction of New Georgian Art.

With a foot in both Baku and London, gallerist Mila Askarova who set up her gallery in Mayfair in 2010, has witnessed first-hand the growth of a local art scene and she has supported it bringing international artists to Azerbaijan mixing them up with local artists, creating dialogues, fostering new collectors and spotting new homespun talent. Recently when I visited her current exhibition ‘Tales from the Caucasus’ dedicated to Azeri contemporary art in London which among other works features outstanding paintings by nineteen year old artist Ulviyya Imam (b.2006), Askarova tells me that she has noticed a real shift over the past fifteen years in the appreciation of art first from the Caucasus and later Central Asia. With reference to her native Azerbaijan, she attributes some of this to a good selection of Azeri artists being consistently shown in the national pavilion in Venice, and YARAT a contemporary art institution founded in Baku by Aida Mahmudova in 2011. She says the “local collector scene has started to grow – artists are gaining momentum abroad and have started to expand their collector base at home”. The prices in her current show strike me as very accessible for new collectors, ranging from a few thousand pounds to £22,000 for Imam’s large canvas ‘The End’ dedicated to Aydin Khirdalani an Azeri poet and meyxana performer who died at the age of 42.

These platforms strong on the ground with international outreach, like Askarova’s Gazelli Art House and the Aspan Gallery in Almaty, and new, large scale museums as well as the Bukhara Biennale are all contributing to the material tangibility of what are fascinating, diverse and disparate art scenes creating a halo effect on the artists from the regions among the international art crowd. Georgian gallerist Baia Tsikoridze tells me that prices for some Georgian painters whose work was previously overlooked have risen a lot, as well as the popularity today of Abramishvili, abstract painter Alexandre Bandzeladze (1927-1992) is now especially sought after on the local market, and Tsikoridze has a 1987 painting for sale currently priced at $25,000 but earlier works are more sought after and command higher sums. “Prices are high because half a dozen new collectors have appeared, and they have been buying up very good works by the artist, and others like Avto Varazi, or Elene Akhvlediani” she explains. For Bonhams’ first initiative in London, Tsikoridze tells me that she consigned many works in the hope of attracting new international collectors to Georgian artists, however, in the end many of the collectors she worked with in Tbilisi ended up buying them, and they questioned the practice of buying them at auction in London when it is more convenient for them to buy locally - the bigger picture of supporting their market internationally perhaps felt too remote. Daria Khristova at Bonhams who curated the auction told me although the top work by Abramishvili was bought by an international collector from London, “as with all emerging markets we need to have joined up forces”. In other words, consistent, sustained commitment for emerging markets to join the international auction market with all stakeholders aligned. The Bonhams sale mostly offered more contemporary, less established artists with prices on average around £6,000, some works sold for under £1,000.

For now, there is more ambivalence than unity, and a sense that what could be a scene is fractured. It was two decades ago that living artists who previously had only been sold on the primary market were offered for sale on the secondary, auction market and now so called red-chip art with its risk of build and bust has become commonplace. Yet today living artists from the Caucasus and Central Asia are still not visible at auction in the international centres of London or Paris, something that they share with most other living artists from the ex-Soviet Union, contemporary artists from Russia, for example, are hardly ever represented on the secondary market in London even though there is a strong trade in 20th century Russian art. This lack of auction representation brings a need for greater transparency. On the one hand it enables canny investors to keep prices artificially low so they can find ‘bargains’, yet on the other markets need confidence, visibility and buy-in to grow. Azeri curator Farah Piriye who is currently working on the project for the Azerbaijan pavilion in Venice this year, laments that there is a lack of systematic exposure for national artists, identifying questions of transparent pricing and secondary market depth as still being in a state of development. She also wants to see more narratives connecting her country’s strong non-conformist art legacy with Azeri art of today and that this will ultimately feed into greater marketability of emerging artists.

I ask Baia Tsikoridze whether artists in Georgia today feel part of a bigger scene or are they isolated? She recalls working for the House of Culture on Rastrelli Street in Tbilisi back in 1984, and that on a state level there were annual exhibitions of art from across all of what were the Soviet Republics and how regularly artists would send their work to exhibitions in Moscow. Today she says regretfully, “there is no sense of community”. For the small domestic art market in Georgia, there are no cultural policies that support it and like everyone there she struggles to get any insurance for her art consignments, and there is no money to fund ambitious international projects. She admits, “there are no exhibitions together, we rarely go to Armenia or Azerbaijan, we do not even know what they are doing there”. If from the outside looking in we easily connect art from across the Caucasus and Central Asia, these are perhaps not easy relationships on the ground. And yet, I recall a video piece at Gazelli’s show in London, called Ecoactivism I, with Azeri artist Farhad Farzali (b.1989) and Kazakh artist Aiganym Mukhamejan (b.1999), both now living and working in Western Europe. A beautiful sound performance where they stand on opposite shores of the Caspian sea, shouting towards each other across the sea.

In Kazakhstan, the emergence of bright, new, state-of-the-art museum spaces signals far more than blue-sky thinking. These new temples to art promise to enrich local audiences, foster meaningful dialogue, and expand opportunities for education and cultural engagement, while opening access to the latest developments in art practice and pedagogy. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are only two of a number of emerging cultural markets, where we are witnessing the rapid rise of large-scale institutions funded by substantial private wealth — often backed by oligarchic fortunes or ruling families. On the surface, the picture appears unequivocally positive: ambitious architecture, museum-grade programming, and international visibility. Yet beneath this impressive façade lies a more complex reality. There is frequently a time lag between the construction of cultural infrastructure and the organic development of a sustainable art ecosystem. Local galleries, collectors, critics, secondary markets, and independent curatorial voices take decades to mature. Without this underlying fabric, institutions risk operating in partial isolation — impressive in scale yet detached from a fully developed market and critical environment.

In the Caucasus and Central Asia, there is a long road ahead, with many questions about how the region’s art scenes can fully capitalise on such ambitious initiatives and encourage art collectors both at home and abroad to continue to invest in its best contemporary artists, to create a cultural legacy. Yet what is unmistakable, in spite of all the challenges, is a spirit of measured optimism — something increasingly rare in today’s world.