Two Museums in Karakalpakstan

Last week was mid-term break at my daughter’s school, so I took some time off to go with my family to Khiva and Nukus.

The big attraction in Nukus was the museum containing works from the collection of Igor Savitsky. It’s no longer unknown, since the 2010 film “Desert of Forbidden Art”. Apparently large numbers of visitors are now coming from outside the country. We met an American academic in the hotel, who was writing a thesis on artist Alexander Volkov, and there was a party from Copenhagen at the museum. The museum was also busy with Uzbek visitors including lively and enthusiastic school parties. I’d read a lot about the museum – and seen the film – but seeing it in reality was overwhelming. It’s really three collections. There are some objects from archaeological expeditions, including from Zoroastrian sites in Karakalpakstan. Those reinforced the impression we had from visiting Khiva, and some of the mediaeval and earlier desert sites, of the richness of the region’s history, and its role as a transport route and a cultural crossroads. There is an impressive collection of traditional Karakalpak applied art – textiles and jewellery and decorated household items. And there is the staggering collection of art from the 1920s to the 1970s, part Russian avant-garde from the two decades after the Revolution, part art by Uzbekistan-based artists from most of the Soviet period.

We were privileged to be shown round the museum by its director, Marinika Babanazarova, who has a deep knowledge of the collections and their history, and helped us to understand the significance of the work on display –which represents only around 3% of what the museum holds. A new gallery is to be built alongside the existing one to increase the space available for display.

The works by Uzbekistan-based artists showed some striking ways of seeing the world. I was especially impressed by the paintings by Alexander Volkov, and the mastery that shows through a range of different experiments with style; the early paintings by Ural Taksynbaev, particularly the mountain landscapes that draw one in and give the impression of being almost more real than reality (as Brecht famously said, realism is not showing real things, but showing how things really are); and the powerful mythic figures of Nadezhda Kashina. And then there are the blazing individual visions of some of the Moscow based artists, like Solomon Nikritin or Aleksey Rybnikov.

For me, every room in this part of the museum was a revelation, a demonstration of the power of art and of the human spirit. How extraordinary and how terrible it is that the creators of these works of genius not only were not appreciated but suffered persecution for their art, were forced to change their work to conform to official guidelines, to abandon their art or to betray their friends, and in some cases died for their pursuit of their convictions.

We also went to see the State Museum of Karakalpakstan, whose collection covers a mixture of ethnography and natural history. It wasn’t easy to find, as it has moved from its former premises and we couldn’t find anybody who knew where it had gone to – everyone assumed we were looking for the Savitsky museum. Finally we were rescued by the director of the Rahnamo hotel, who had no idea initially who we were but very generously took us to the building that houses the museum’s stores, and from there to the school named after Pushkin, where there is a temporary display from the museum’s collection, while a new building is prepared for it to move into. There are interesting ethnographic and archaeological displays, and some nice models of some of the desert fortresses we’d been visiting the previous day. But the most poignant exhibit is a stuffed tiger, which is said by the guidebooks to be the last Turan tiger (although subsequent internet research suggests its status as the last of its species is uncertain). It’s quite small, for a tiger, and a little faded. But it’s moving as a symbol of the loss of something important, something whose loss cannot be undone.

Biodiversity – or rather the threats to it – is one of the biggest issues that humanity faces now and over the coming years and decades. Preserving biodiversity is partly important for its instrumental value – for example the medical value of jungle plants, the interdependence of the species that make up ecosystems on which we depend for food and agriculture or other environmental services, or the value of nature for tourism. But it goes beyond that. It’s a question of the quality of life, and the quality of the world that we pass on to our children and grandchildren. Nature is a part of what makes us human and the loss of any species diminishes us.