Festival of Contemporary Art “48 hours Tashkent. RestArt "will be held for the first time in the capital (map of locations)

The idea of the event belongs to the curators Gulnara Ishmuratova and Antonina Kadyrova, who in May 2019, within the framework of the Goethe Institute's Cultural Academy in Central Asia program, visited various institutions in Berlin, in particular, the Neukölln Cultural Network, which has been annually holding a large-scale event since 1999 cultural life of Berlin - the festival "48 hours of Neukölln" (48hNK).

According to the authors of the idea, the Tashkent festival is an analogue of the Berlin one, but adapted to the metropolitan urban environment and designed for the participation of, first of all, local artists, in order to support and make their art more visible.

Festival "48 Hours Tashkent" is a new format in the cultural life of Tashkent. Over the course of three days, it will bring together several art venues, public spaces and figures from various forms of contemporary art.

It will involve 14 locations: galleries, exhibition halls, an ethno-park, as well as a theater, a house and artists' workshops, an underground passage, and a courtyard. The festival focuses not on traditional conventional exhibitions, but on an immersive, participatory approach designed for the involvement and presence of the viewer, his interaction with artists and their works. The upcoming event will feature individual, group and curatorial projects related to the theme of the festival, as well as concerts, lectures on contemporary art and documentary photography.

The general theme of the festival "RestArt" focuses on the ambiguity of interpretation. This is also a direct translation from English as "renewal", "restart". That is, participants and spectators are invited to restart their vision, or maybe take a fresh look at contemporary art. Other meanings consist in direct translations of the words that make up its name: "rest + Art" - "rest + art".

Weekends are often spent in the center of urban culture. At the end of the week, from Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday, it will be possible to observe the modern cultural life of Tashkent and “relax in art”. Moving from one location to another, the viewer becomes an accomplice of the event, “immersed in art”. Holding the festival in different locations in the format of a continuous event for 48 hours, as a kind of tour of the places where the viewer meets art, will provide an opportunity not only to get acquainted with the work of artists, but also to take a fresh look at familiar places through the prism of contemporary art.

Thus, the festival asks questions of renewal, renewal, possibly rethinking views on contemporary art. These questions are quite general, but at the same time they are always deeply personal. In this regard, first of all, the individual reflection of both the participants of the festival and the audience on the restart of the modern art process is of interest.

The festival will feature 14 locations, 45 projects and 49 participants from Uzbekistan. The project from "48 Hours Novosibirsk" will be presented by the artist Mayana Nasybullova.