The Bukhara Biennial has announced the appointment of Kulapat Yantrasast as artistic director of its upcoming edition, due to take place from 3 September to 21 November 2027 in Bukhara, Uzbekistan.
Yantrasast, the founder and creative director of WHY Architecture, was selected for the role by Gayane Umerova and the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF). With a practice spanning museology, the development of exhibitions and cultural projects, Yantrasast brings extensive experience to the role with recent projects including the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Dib Contemporary Art Center in Bangkok, the ilmi Science Discovery & Innovation Center in Riyadh and several upcoming projects at the Musée du Louvre in Paris.
Chairperson of the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation, Gayane Umerova, said “Following the extraordinary response to the inaugural edition of Bukhara Biennial, we are delighted to welcome Kulapat Yantrasast as Artistic Director for 2027”.
“The 2025 edition showed how contemporary art and craft can open new conversations around heritage, community and cultural identity, while reconnecting Bukhara with its historic role as a centre of intellectual and creative exchange along the Silk Roads. Kulapat brings a deeply humanistic and cross-disciplinary vision – one that understands architecture, craft, ecology, scholarship and artistic practice not as separate fields, but as interconnected ways of shaping how we live together and imagine the future. We look forward to what he will build here.” Umerova continues.
In 2026, ACDF and Yantrasast collaborated on a project bringing together Uzbek artisans and designers from abroad to explore the shrinking of the Aral Sea and the tradition of craft in Karakalpakstan for this year’s Milan Design Week entitled When Apricots Blossom, which was subsequently shortlisted for the Fuorisalone Award and received a Special Mention from the event’s panel members. The cultural practitioner is also a 2026 Art Basel Medalist, recognised for his significant contributions in the realm of exhibition creation and museum architecture.
On his appointment, Yantrasast commented: “Uzbekistan claimed me on my first visit – not through its monuments, but through its people: their stories, their generosity, and the quiet confidence of a culture that has always belonged to the world. The 2025 edition was remarkable, reawakening Bukhara’s role as a true centre of cultural exchange. My ambition for 2027 is to deepen that conversation – to treat infrastructure itself as culture, where caravanserais, madrasas, hammams, public squares and gardens become living rooms for ideas exchanged between artists, artisans, ecologists and scholars. The biennial is an invitation to let art and culture do what they do best: deepen life, honour place and make sustainability a shared inheritance rather than a distant ambition. This is long work. The biennial in 2027 will end; Bukhara will keep going. What matters to me is that every commission, every restored building, every garden we touch, every encounter between an artisan and a participant is a seed planted for the generations who will inherit this city.”
The 2027 edition of the Bukhara Biennial will build on the inaugural edition, bridging the gap between traditional artisanal practices and contemporary art by collaborating with experts across disciplines, including historians, economists, ecologists and cultural practitioners.
The upcoming biennial will be overseen by the newly formed Bukhara Biennial Advisory Board, with Aya Al-Bakree, Alia Al-Senussi, Dilyara Allakhverdova, Alberto Cavalli, Aaron Cezar, Chris Dercon and Michael Govan, with the curatorial theme set to be announced later in the year.
