Central Asia

Art from the lands of Central Asia, from nomad goldwork and Silk Road murals to Timurid tilework, suzani embroidery and contemporary art.

No works indexed yet · 10 related artists

No open-access works for Central Asia are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.

About

Steppe nomads made portable art of great refinement: Saka goldsmiths in present-day Kazakhstan worked stags, snow leopards and griffins into belt plaques and headdresses. Along the Silk Road, Sogdian merchants decorated their houses at Panjakent and Samarkand with murals of banquets, epics and foreign envoys in the 7th and 8th centuries. Under Timur and his heirs in the 14th and 15th centuries, Samarkand gained turquoise domes and walls sheathed in glazed tile.

Textiles carried these traditions into the home. Silk ikat, with its blurred-edged patterns, and suzani hangings embroidered with large blossoms and suns remain signatures of the region. In the Soviet period, painters such as Alexander Volkov in Tashkent combined local subjects with modernist colour. Since the 1990s, artists including Said Atabekov in Kazakhstan and the Kyrgyz duo Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev have used video and performance to look at nomad identity, migration and post-Soviet change.