The Centre for Studies in Russian, Central Asian and Caucasian Art (CSAR) - officially inaugurated on March 6, 2011 - is one of the research centres of the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
Upcoming events CSAR 2025/2026
Reinstallation of the Museum of Fine Arts of Bukhara
The project of the general reinstallation of the Museum of Fine Arts of Bukhara promoted by Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation and was curated by Silvia Burini and Giuseppe Barbieri. It unfolds across three different Galleries.
The first hosts the temporary exhibition “Foodscapes. Maps of Flavor, Echoes of the Soul”, connected to the general theme of the 2025 Bukhara Biennale, “Recipes for Broken Hearts”. The exhibition presents a series of paintings (mostly from the Bukhara Museum, with some essential loans from the State Art Museum of Samarkand), constantly and intimately integrated with textile and ceramic artifacts, highlighting the equal dignity of these objects alongside figurative artworks.
The predominant subject is the “Still Life,” expressed through depictions of fruit and traditional dishes. Alongside this theme, however, appear rituals and scenes of gathering, domestic meals, traditional preparations, family intimacies, and ingredients that emphasize the presence of food in everyday life and social interaction, as well as food metaphors that may reach spiritual, moral, political, or social registers, revealing food as a marker of cultural identity.
The other two Galleries (“Landscapes”) first allow the visitor to admire the different modes of representing an ancient yet living city, which has inspired artists in their engagement with historical monuments, city views, and depictions sometimes realistic and sometimes abstract. They subsequently broaden into more general representations of the Uzbek landscape, with particular attention to the role of water (“Waterscapes”), at a time of radical transformations that span the entire 20th century and the early decades of the present one.
New Museum Installation in Nukus
“The World of Igor Savitsky” significantly completes the reorganization process of the Nukus Museum, promoted and supported by the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation, chaired by Gayane Umerova. This process had started at the end of last summer: at that time, on the second floor of the building, the two major exhibitions that had taken place in the spring in Florence (Uffizi Gallery, Palazzo Pitti) and Venice (Ca’ Foscari Exhibitions) were brought together (with some additions), both titled “Uzbekistan: Avant-garde in the Desert”. In Florence, the exhibition focused on the relationship between “Light and Color,” while in Venice, it explored the relationship between “Form and Symbol.”
These two exhibitions, curated by Silvia Burini and Giuseppe Barbieri, professors at Ca' Foscari, revealed to the Western audience an extraordinary experience of cultural “dialogue” that had engaged artists of diverse origins (Uzbek, Kazakh, Armenian, Russian from various backgrounds) and differing sensitivities in Uzbekistan for at least three decades. In Central Asia, these artists discovered and modernized millennia-old traditions, such as those in textiles, architectural decoration, miniatures, and woodworking. They immersed themselves in a dazzling palette of landscapes, ancient cities, and archaeological sites, building together a unique trend in avant-garde art.
The Italian exhibitions (prepared through meticulous research and with the help of established international research experiences) for the first time linked the works of the Savitsky Museum in Nukus with those of the National Museum in Tashkent. They demonstrated that the artistic experience in Uzbekistan was not the peripheral and outdated epitome of early 20th-century Russian Avant-garde, but rather a specific and organic Avanguardia Orientalis. Its proponents had certainly engaged with the works of Russian masters who arrived in Tashkent in the spring of 1921, but they had also, in the same manner and with equal intensity, engaged with the cultural memory of a region that had witnessed, over more than two millennia of history, meetings and intersections of civilizations. This is one of the rarest cases in the global history of art where the desire for dialogue precedes and forms a new, recognizable, and admirable language.
Following widespread and highly qualified praise for the Italian exhibitions and the reinstallation of the second floor of the Nukus Museum ("Uzbekistan: Avant-Garde in the Desert"), Silvia Burini and Giuseppe Barbieri were invited to complete the curatorial process with an overall update of the Museum, including a rethink of its top floor.
Find out more at cafoscariNEWS [ITA]
Mapping Diaspora: Russian Art Beyond Borders
We are pleased to announce that the project "Mapping Diaspora: Russian Art Beyond Borders", proposed by Professor Silvia Burini, has been selected as one of the winners of the SPIN 2024 call. The call, open to faculty members at Ca' Foscari University, awarded research proposals that meet high international excellence standards while fostering innovation within specific scientific fields.
The project focuses on the cultural emigration of artists and intellectuals who, in opposition to Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, chose to leave their country. This migration has given rise to an alternative, transnational space of resistance. Mapping and understanding this cultural phenomenon, with its spaces, narratives, and exchanges, provides an opportunity to examine deeply the concepts of national identity and collective memory.