Unravelling the Silk Road
“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 supported by the British Council’s Connections Through Culture Programme. The project explores rich medical history and current healthcare and environmental challenges and innovations in both 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 was born in what is now Uzbekistan) and contemporary issues such as the ongoing stigma of tuberculosis, soil health, and the environment. Artworks in the exhibition incorporate a range of media including 3D printed forms, natural dyes, anatomical wax, recycled medical waste, salt and plants.
The collaboration culminated in a solo exhibition of new works at CAMUZ – The Contemporary Art Museum of Uzbekistan in Urgench, curated by museum director Shirin Tashova. This exhibition encompasses 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. Works from the exhibition will be accessioned to the collection of CAMUZ – The Contemporary Art Museum of Uzbekistan.
“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.
Dumitriu undertook a hybrid residency (online and in-person) including an intensive physical residency in Urgench and Tashkent Uzbekistan, and created a new body of artworks working with locally sourced materials such as silk, gold leaf, local plants, and natural dyes, as well as sculptural materials and biomedia. The project fostered co-creation methodologies, and enabled the development of new artworks informed by local perspectives, materials, and histories, creating a dialogue between the UK and Uzbek artists and arts professionals, patients, medics and scientists, facilitating hands-on workshops, networking, mentoring, and professional development sessions (for Uzbek artists, ecologists and scientists interested in working across art and science).
Artworks
Materia Medica Necklace
This necklace is inspired by Avicenna’s writings in his “Materia Medica” (book 2) where he describes treating a range of illnesses using indigo, madder, pearls and roasted silk. Experiments were made using undyed Uzbek pure Margilan silk and 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. The project research also connects to contemporary work to improve soil quality and reduce salinity through the growth of indigo plants.
Healing Bowl
This work explores soil health in both the UK/Europe and Uzbekistan. The soil in Uzbekistan is very salty, this high saline content is a result of intense agricultural use during the time of the Soviet Union when Uzbekistan was tasked to grow cotton, and only cotton. This led to the shrinking of the Aral Sea as water was diverted to irrigate cotton plantations. Nowadays Uzbekistan grows its own food including rice for their national dish Plov. The important natural dye indigo has been researched in Uzbekistan as a means of reducing the salinity of the soil and has shown benefits.
In the UK/EU a significant issue explored by Dumitriu in her “Greening the Lab” Project is the huge amounts of medical waste including single use plastics that go to landfill. One way to combat this is to make compost from some of these items, such as using hospital aprons that can be bio-digested o make compost. Here Dumitriu has developed her own biomaterials recipes and here she included bio-digested hospital apron compost (supplied by HaPPEarth) and natural indigo dye. The gold leaf represents the economic cost of not taking care of soil.
Materia Medica: Natural/Human Intervention
These three works highlight intricate stains created on the walls by storms in Urgench that happened just before the exhibition. Rather than paint over them the Dumitriu highlighted their beauty using gold leaf and dried Ephedra plants which are burned in family homes or used for traditional medicine in Uzbekistan. Ephedra is widely considered by to be the botanical source of haoma (or homa), a sacred, stimulating plant used in ancient and modern Zoroastrian rituals as a drink of immortality and divine connection.
Materia Medica: Organs
These organs are cast and hand embellished in anatomical modelling wax in reference to Avicenna’s references to the use of wax in his “Materia Medica” (book 2).
Materia Medica: Apothecary
A small apothecary of bottles containing various materials mentioned in Avicenna’s Materia Medica (book 2).
Materia Medica: Tracings
Organs hand-drawn using 3D printing over laser prints.
Materia Medica: Morbid Anatomy
Monoprints based on the images of organs, some on vintage medical texts.
Materia Medica: Combining Cultures
Combining healing and antimicrobial natural dyes with 3D printed bacteria and cells with tissue culture vessels that the artist often uses to grow cells from the lab.
Materia Medica: AI Futures
From the history of medicine to the future, these works explore materials discussed in Avicenna’s Materia Medica (book 2) such as pearls and silk, in the context of bacteria and the use of AI in the future of healthcare.
Exhibitions
Materia Medica: A Solo Exhibition of BioArt by Anna Dumitriu at CAMUZ – The Contemporary Art Museum of Uzbekistan in Urgench, Uzbekistan, from 3rd April 2026 until at least 2nd June 2026.
BioArt Transformations: A Solo Exhibition by Anna Dumitriu at the Regency Town House Basement Annexe, Brunswick Square, Brighton and Hove, UK, from 5th – 17th May 2026
Media and Publications
“Anna Dumitriu explains her practice of BioArt: creating work from bacteria, cells and DNA to explore our relationship with the living world“, Artists Open Houses Blog, (UK), May 2026
Materia Medica Opening, Khorezm TV (Uzbekistan), April 2026