As part of the Venice Biennale's parallel programme, a solo exhibition by Vyacheslav Akhunov, a luminary of Uzbek unofficial art, has opened at the magnificent Palazzo Franchetti, overlooking the Grand Canal. Called ‘Instruments of the Mind,’ the show marks a significant moment for one of Central Asia's most singular creative voices.

Akhunov is a solitary figure: an outsider, painter, conceptualist, theorist, writer, and performer. Born in 1948 in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, into the family of the distinguished Soviet artist Urumbay Akhunov (1923-1996), he studied at the Surikov Institute in Moscow, where he encountered the Moscow underground scene. On returning to Uzbekistan, he stepped away from painting, and whilst earning a living by reproducing portraits of Soviet leaders from stencils, turned to conceptual art, the only artist in Uzbekistan to do so. He has spoken of how chance played its part: he found a dressmaking pattern book in a rubbish skip and, out of boredom during compulsory lectures on Marxism-Leninism, began making notes on the patterns. From that moment, Akhunov started working with texts, signs, symbols, and artefacts of the Soviet era, transforming them into material for collages, charts, installations, and works created solely to be kept hidden away inside a drawer. The cultural context of Central Asia also left its mark as in parallel, he studied Sufism, Taoism, and Islamic calligraphy. These traditions form part of the DNA of his practice, and they distinguish Akhunov from Moscow conceptualism with which his work shares apparent methodological and visual affinities.

One of the most internationally recognized artists of the region with works held in the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, M HKA in Antwerp, the Centre Pompidou, and other major collections Akhunov has participated in the Venice Biennale, Documenta, the ‘Ostalgia’ exhibition at the New Museum in New York, and numerous other critically acclaimed projects. Yet despite this global recognition, his “guerrilla art” has never been honoured with an exhibition in his homeland. Quite the opposite: his work was for many years subjected to censorship and suppression, and until 2017 he was unable even to obtain permission to leave the country.

‘Instruments of the Mind’ is the artist’s first solo exhibition to be held under the auspices of a state institution - the Fund for Development of Culture and Arts of Uzbekistan – spearheaded by the Fund’s director, Gayane Umerova, supported by the British-Iranian curator, art historian and researcher Dr Sara Raza.

Dr Raza's scholarly interests centre on the art of Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Middle East. In 2022 she published her acclaimed monograph ‘Punk Orientalism: The Art of Rebellion,’ which became a bestseller at a time of growing international interest in the culture and complex history of Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus, as well as their historical ties to the Arab world and Iran. Raza is also currently serving as artistic director of the future Centre for Contemporary Art in Tashkent, where she is developing its mission and programme.

Despite its impressive scale with no less than ten installations spread over a dozen rooms, the exhibition is not a retrospective. Its title derives from a play on the components of the word “mantra”: manas (mind) and tra (instrument). As Dr Raza observes, the mantras of Central Asia’s ancient religious traditions, from Zoroastrianism to Islam, were violently supplanted during the Soviet period by the slogans of atheistic Marxist-Leninist ideology, and this shift in paradigms - a laying bare of the mechanisms of linguistic forms, rituals, and meanings - lies at the very heart of Akhunov’s method. The exhibition deliberately eschews a chronological structure in favour of thematic groupings of works with overlapping subjects and motifs, arranged across the twelve rooms like an archive: one that reflects, in depth and emotional richness, a space of memory in which recollections of flourishing periods alternate with the weight of difficult and terrifying historical upheavals – the colonisation of Central Asia, repression, wars, and conflicts. Yet there is neither denunciatory stridency nor documentary harshness in Akhunov’s work. His principal instrument is poetic “defamiliarisation”, achieved through resonant imagery, deconstruction, linguistic and visual play, and a refined irony that at times recalls the philosophical reflections of Eastern sages.

The entrance to the exhibition immediately arrests the eye: the palazzo’s ornately decorated interiors and marble staircases are thrown into sharp contrast by the austere simplicity of enormous white letters forming a curious spatial composition of the words ‘Up–Down’ (2026), upon which weary Biennale visitors perch to rest. The installation, realised from a 1975 sketch, evokes a staircase with steps leading in opposite directions, playing on the absurdity of senseless commands and the mechanisms by which human bodies are directed in public space.

In the first room, visitors encounter ‘Triumphal Arch’ (1979/2026): a portal bristling with scissors of every conceivable kind thrust into the walls, and barred by stanchions hung with a red velvet ribbon. This unsettling yet ironic artefact interprets the Soviet ceremonial of televised inaugurations – the solemn unveiling of innumerable monuments to leaders, the cutting of ribbons at the utopian “construction projects of the century” that demanded superhuman mobilisation of the population, and which so often dragged on indefinitely or were never completed at all.

The second room is devoted to the central theme of the exhibition: the investigation and interpretation of mantras as a mode of critical analysis of the artefacts of Soviet everyday reality – a form of archaeological excavation (the artist’s father worked on the South-Khorezm expedition) deploying both media-ideological and material objects. The method, which Akhunov established in his practice from 1974 onwards, consists of repetitive, calligraphically inscribed texts in Russian applied over dressmaking patterns ‘Sewing Patterns,’ 1977–1978), magazines, newspapers, and reproductions of canonical works by official artists such as Aleksandr Samokhvalov (1894-1971), Aleksandr Deineka (1899-1969), and Tair Salakhov (1928-2021) (‘Mantras,’ 1977–2010).

In the series ‘Rall/Protective Veil’, (1984), mantras written in red ballpoint pen are shrouded beneath a veil of tracing paper; in ‘Cracks’ (1988), pages inscribed with the repeated phrase “Lenin is life, and life has no end” are torn in two – evoking the ground in the devastating 1966 Tashkent earthquake, but also a reminder of the ruptures and breakdowns that arise in the life of a totalitarian society when its institutions of power are abused.

The artist’s best-known series are displayed in the adjoining room: the ‘Leniniana’ of 1977, from the series ‘Desert of Oblivion’ (1970–1990), in which collages of cut-out reproductions of Soviet monuments sink into shifting sands, gradually vanishing from the landscape of living history. In ‘Art-heology of the UzSSR’ (1975–1986), Akhunov imagines a future in which the socialist state is described through pseudo-scientific language, excavation, and the cartography of a lost civilisation – a kind of Socialith. At the centre of the room stands ‘House of Eternity. Sarcophagus' (1986/2026), in which a model skeleton rests within a ziggurat of valve-era television sets.

The main hall in the palazzo serves as the conceptual heart of the exhibition – the point at which all its thematic threads converge, a dedication to the word as image, to the letter, and to the artist’s book. Arranged on plinths reminiscent in form of dastarkhan – traditional Central Asian tables – are some sixty handmade books containing texts, drawings, collages, albums, and sketches. On the walls hang the celebrated works from 1975 that have become classics – ‘Alphabet,’ the basis for the ‘ABC’ project, which examines the literacy campaigns of the early 20th century. These campaigns, conducted at breakneck speed using Communist texts and slogans, led to the dominance of Soviet culture as an ideological construct and severed centuries-old cultural ties. In the handwritten ‘Instruction’ (1976), Akhunov methodically reproduces the didactic language of the Soviet artist’s code of conduct in the form of absurd commands, Kafkaesque directives, and prescriptions. Also on display are sketches from the late 1970s in which words rendered in an impersonal, stamped typeface – "stuffy", "quiet", "empty" – dissolve into individual letters, becoming spatial objects set within desert landscapes, simultaneously a rebus and an architectural structure, shedding their meaning and becoming purely pictorial elements – an effect the curator has likened to that produced by calligraphy.

The neon installation ‘What Am I Doing Here? What Am I?’ (1979/2026) was conceived in the city of Fergana, following the completion of the artist’s studies in Moscow and his return to a situation of creative vacuum in which the only prospect was conscious solitude and incomprehension from colleagues who had no notion of contemporary art. During a summons to the KGB following his protest against the war in Afghanistan, fearful of reprisals, Akhunov cried out “What am I doing here?” – and noted down the idea that was born in that moment on a scrap of paper. This installation went viral and acquired new resonance in the context of the Biennale’s opening – an event that provoked frustration not only through the overwhelming abundance of artistic impressions, but also through the irreconcilable political views of guests and participants, which spilled over into numerous street demonstrations and protests. Beyond the flood of photographs and selfies shared on social media, one of the most coveted accessories was a tote bag bearing the inscription, available at the exhibition’s opening.

Two of the exhibition’s most piercing sections address the themes of migration and memory. In the ninth room, drawings, paintings, and an installation are presented in which the central motif and metaphor of displacement – so often forced and tragic, given the centuries-long history of Central Asia – is a Soviet brown suitcase, its lid covered with photographs of loved ones, postcards, pictures of famous figures, prayer instruction cards, and filled with sand dunes. The starting point of the project was the artist’s own nomadism and experience as an outsider – his journeys from Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to Moscow. In the years following the dissolution of the USSR, this phenomenon acquired an acutely negative connotation, accompanied by a surge of intolerance, xenophobia, violence, and conflict within what had once been a single country. In Akhunov’s words, in his project “a grain of sand is the image of a person condemned by circumstance to become a nomad, wandering in search of a better life.”

In the adjoining room, the theme of irreversible loss, erasure, and the obliteration of memory is explored through series from the early 2020s in which the artist literally erases faces from precious photographs drawn from his personal archive, magazine images, handwritten texts, and even his own autobiography – reflecting through this radical gesture on the fragility and ephemerality of memory, and on the deliberate amnesia that surrounds a painful and traumatic past.

The exhibition concludes with the installation 'Road to Light’ (1982/2026) – a slender white beam at the end of a dark tunnel that one cannot help but read as hope for a brighter future: a future that has yet to arrive.

The exhibition at Palazzo Franchetti has been a revelation of Vyacheslav Akhunov’s work for international audiences – including curators and specialists already well acquainted with his practice – as the majority of the works on display have left the artist’s studio for the very first time. This vast body of work was painstakingly created and preserved in his atelier in those same Soviet suitcases, which inevitably call to mind the work of Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948): his collages, his absurdist practices, and his belief in the redemptive mission of art assembled from the fragments of a world torn apart by war.