A mediated tour exploring the relationship between archaeology and modernism as a pertinent question in contemporary culture, and how art reinterprets the mechanisms of historical imagination.
Split Together, Merged Apart
- Date:
- 3 Apr–
28 Sep 2025
- Age restrictions
- 12+
English-language mediated tours of
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The exhibition Split Together, Merged Apart examines the history of the Khorezm Archaeological and Ethnographic Expedition (1937–1991) as an intersection of scientific research, Soviet utopian projects, and contemporary artistic statements. The exhibition creates a dialogue between artefacts, archival materials, and works by contemporary artists, including pieces specially commissioned for this project.
Ali Sherry. Still from the video “The Digger”, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Imane Farès
A key topic for discussion is the paradoxical interaction between past and future in Soviet modernism. We shall examine this through the lens of the historic Khorezm region, where large-scale transformations—the construction of water canals, infrastructure, and cities—existed alongside attempts to preserve the vanishing heritage of an ancient Central Asian civilisation. Within this context, we discover new connections within enclosed historical time, revealed through archaeology, artistic interpretations, and historical imagination.
Official partner of the
We invite you to explore with our mediators: How do we perceive historical time? How do archaeology and art reconstruct history whilst keeping it open to interpretation? Can the gaps between disciplines and epochs become sources of new meaning?
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