Project: Bound for Life and Education: Sara Eshonturaeva and the Jadid Movement in Soviet Uzbekistan

Date: OCTOBER 2022

© Esteshhad Quisay

An exhibition exploring the life and legacy of a prominent Uzbek actress, Sara Eshonturaeva, made from her family’s archival material preserved by her granddaughter. The show illuminated the complexities, contradictions and paradoxes of culture and art in Soviet Uzbekistan.

An important Muslim reformist movement, Jadidism, was integral to the formation of Uzbekistan as a nation state, and who were later removed from all forms of (pictorial) existence during Stalin’s Great Purge.

As a discursive event, the exhibition paid attention to the presence of these Jadid members in the earlier photographs, and their palpable absence following their mass persecution in the late 1930s. The rare photographs in Asia House Gallery reclaimed a sense of Jadid continuity, following this moment of rupture.

Sponsored by the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation, curated by Nilou Edmonds (in consultation with ZC), it was inaugurated by Uzbek Ambassador Said Rustamov October 2022.