“Unravelling the Silk Road” (2025-26) is a pioneering Anglo-Uzbek collaboration between British BioArtist Anna Dumitriu and Uzbek museum director and curator Shirin Tashova. Dumitriu is exploring the rich medical history and current healthcare challenges in Uzbekistan and the UK, bridging historical narratives around figures like Avicenna (who completed a significant medical encyclopaedia “The Canon of Medicine in the year 1025) and contemporary issues such as the ongoing stigma of tuberculosis. Working through the innovative framework of BioArt, a cutting-edge form of art-science practice that explores biomedicine and living systems, this project will forge new creative connections.
Dumitriu is undertaking a hybrid residency (online and in-person) including an intensive physical residency in Uzbekistan, where she will create a new body of artworks working with locally sourced materials such as silk, and natural dyes, as well as sculptural materials and biomedia, and fostering co-creation methodologies, allowing for the development of new artworks informed by local perspectives, materials, and histories.
The project aims to create a dialogue between UK and Uzbek artists and arts professionals, patients, medics and scientists, facilitating hands-on workshops, networking, mentoring, and professional development sessions (for Uzbek artists interested in working across art and science).
The collaboration will culminate in an exhibition at CAMUZ – The Contemporary Art Museum of Uzbekistan in Urgench, curated by museum director Shirin Tashova. This exhibition will encompass new works created through the residency alongside existing digital works. In person and online streamed talks by Dumitriu and and other participants will further disseminate learning and stimulate discussion.
“Unravelling the Silk Road” aims to create lasting artistic partnerships, offer unique forms of engagement and critical reflections on health and cultural heritage between the two nations.
Experiments are being made using undyed Uzbek pure Margilan silk and ikat made from adras, alongside natural dye plants that were used by Avicenna to treat various diseases, such as madder root. Avicenna believed that dyes had the ability to enter bodily tissue and treat disease (a concept later developed by Paul Ehrlich), for example how the colour of madder root can be excreted through urine (in the same way Rifampicin is nowadays). He also used roasted or burnt silk to make electuaries (sweet pastes) or troches (medicinal lozenges) treat respiratory diseases such as tuberculosis, combining them with pearls, gold, silver, amber, starch, gum arabic, and milk. Spider silk was also used by Avicenna to stop bleeding from wounds.
This project is supported by the British Council’s Connections Through Culture Programme.
Image: Photograph of funnel weaver spider (Agelenidae species) silk in Tashkent by Anna Dumitriu