Uzbekistan: Heritage in Motion, at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha until 28 November 2026, traces more than a millennium of Uzbek art, from the eve of the Islamic conquest of Central Asia to the present day. Organised with Uzbekistan's Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF), it brings together 146 objects from Qatari collections and 13 Uzbek institutions. Among them are the celebrated seventh-century Afrasiab wall paintings from Samarkand, shown alongside Timurid architectural fragments and scientific manuscripts.
Robe with confronted lions, Central Asia, Sogdian period, 7th century. Silk samite (weft-faced compound twill). Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, MIA.2013.89
Four themes lead from the pre-Islamic crossroads of Transoxiana, through Samanid and Timurid architecture and the region's great scholars, to Legacies of Clay and Thread. This is the largest section, devoted to ceramics, dress, jewellery and textiles. Silk, the region's great medium, runs from the Sogdian loom to the modern ikat workshops of Margilan. Highlights for HALI readers include a Sogdian samite robe with confronted lions, a Lakai suzani and a 20th-century ikat chapan. Curator Anastasiya Silkatcheva asks visitors to see Uzbekistan 'not as a country frozen in its monuments', but as one whose Islamic-era traditions continue to shape its art and craft today.
