Recipes for Broken Hearts

Diana Campbell for Bukhara Biennial

The heart is a complex instrument, in need of constant maintenance as it beats over the course of a lifetime. More than a physical organ pumping blood, the heart functions as a locus of identity and loss, connecting the mind, soul, and body and bridging material and spiritual worlds. It also plays a core role in art, as it “produces imaginative awareness and comprehensive intuition of the mysterious and the miraculous.”[1]. In many mystical traditions, the heart is the key to connecting with the higher frequency of the divine. Perhaps even more so than the brain, the heart contains an “imaginative intelligence that is so powerful that it can change the world in what it manifests through the combination of knowing and loving… Art facilitates insights into how humans participate in worldmaking—how our words, thoughts, and actions impact us, as well as how we shape and are shaped by our environments.”[2] The heart’s pervasive awareness means that we feel it breaking with extreme intensity. Many of our environments today are teeming with heartbreak—from environment collapse to conflicts and polarization. Like any form of rupture, heartbreak can be a dynamic space for transformation. It is one of our greatest teachers, a universal experience that can be felt both individually and collectively and that links us to all times and places, especially through creative expression.

The heart’s creative power comes into view when we look to thenth-century Bukhara, a time and place that can offer us many ways of mending heartbreaks. Bukhara in the tenth century was home to Ibn Sina, a polymath known as the father of modern medicine whose contributions to science and philosophy are vast. Located in the heart of Central Asia in modern-day Uzbekistan, Bukhara was an intellectual and economic center along the Silk Roads, a place where religious and cultural traditions from all corners of the world commingled to produce a rich atmosphere of learning, craft, and artistic production. That atmosphere of vigorous intellectual exchange is reflected in Ibn Sina’s correspondence with another great polymath of the Islamic Golden Age Al-Beruni, as well as in the writings of the great Sufis who lived there in subsequent centuries. For more than a millennium Bukhara has been a place where people came together to find togetherness in the quest of a better life through a search for spiritual, intellectual and worldly knowledge.[3]

Bukhara also became renowned for its artisans, who were often depicted by poets in shahrashub, a genre of short love poems about young craftsmen.[4]

The beauty and magnificence that these artisans created in Bukhara have captivated poets and travelers for centuries and contributed to the celebration of this era in the city’s life through to the present day.[5]  It is a city built from mud bricks. In his lost manuscript Philosophy of Orientals, Ibn Sina is said to have posited that, unlike cities of stone, which stand tall against the forces of nature, mud cities like Bukhara accept in their very creation that they are part of nature and its changes. This description rings true when we consider Bukhara’s trajectory over the centuries—from a Zoroastrian and Buddish Sogdian city-state to a capital of a Turco-Mongol dynasty to an abode of Sufi saints—as it embraces influences from all sides, moving between ethnic, religious, and cultural identities to produce a complex historical tapestry that invites study and reflection.

Neuroscience shows us how the brain responds to beauty and influences our emotions. Ibn Sina also explored this topic in Bukhara before the discipline even had a name. He was as concerned with mental and emotional health as he was with physical health, diagnosing and providing treatments for ailments such as kidney stones, inflammations, and insomnia, as well as lovesickness. We encounter Ibn Sina and a tale of heartbreak when eating palov, the national rice dish of Uzbekistan and much of Central Asia. One of the many stories surrounding this staple of Uzbek cuisine is that palov was invented by Ibn Sina to mend the broken heart of a prince who could not marry the daughter of a craftsman. Palov was simultaneously a recipe and a prescription—old recipes suggest it as cure for ailments; when we eat comfort food like palov, our dopamine levels increase, just as they do when we experience togetherness either intimately or collectively. The Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman, who specialized in the study of happiness for over two decades, spoke of commensality, a term meaning shared meals with friends, as one of the strongest positive contributors to our emotional well-being. Not only relegated to the world of food, recipes are beautiful metaphors for how we share and transmit remedies, express love, and preserve memories that carry with them a sense of identity and belonging. A link between eating and healing can also be found in the etymology of the word restaurant: derived from the French word restaurer (“to restore”), it referred to an eighteen-century Parisian establishment that served mostly soups and broths meant to restore your strength and health.

We believe that Bukhara holds many extraordinary recipes in its heart. The Bukhara Biennial is part of a long-term process of revitalizing some of the extraordinary sites that were essential to developing the culture that we celebrate today, bringing them back into the pulse of life of the city. The biennial’s site, the Bukhara Cultural District, combines the restoration and conservation of the city’s architectural heritage with new construction. It is designed by waiwai, led by Wael Al Awar, with landscape design by Günther Vogt. The first edition of the Bukhara Biennial inaugurates this cultural district with the exhibition Recipes for Broken Hearts, embracing art and the creative imagination as vital propositions to soothe the world and conjure joy. The biennial is meant to draw attention and care to the modern-day Bukharans, fostering lasting and meaningful transformations in their city rather than serving as a temporary intervention.

Exploring various ways of being together and recognizing the role of beauty in mental and emotional health, Recipes for Broken Hearts takes the form of an expanded feast of art and culture held at spaces across Bukhara that have been renewed for contemporary life while remaining informed by their rich past. The exhibition echoes the celebrations of the fourteenth-century Timurid Empire, which featured an abundance of art, music, poetry, dance, and of course, food, that could extend for as long as three months[6]. Working across all sensorial registers that complement the visual, Recipes for Broken Hearts takes inspiration from these grand banquets, which—in the words of the chef Ferran Adrià—were possibly the first art installations in history[7].

Learning from cultures of gathering from Uzbekistan and around the world, Recipes for Broken Hearts is imagined as a free and open-to-all forum that contributes to building meaningful bonds between people, relying on art’s power to connect people from vastly different cultural backgrounds. Participatory and collaborative, the curatorial process invites practitioners from the visual arts, craft, culinary arts, sound, design, and fashion, as well as visitors, to metaphorically bring something to the table—the dastarkhan—creating a collection of heart-mending recipes born in Bukhara. Culture can be described as how we experience togetherness in time. Time is an essential ingredient in healing a broken heart, and also in cooking Uzbek food and in making many of the crafts for which Bukhara is known, most famously carpets. Time is difficult to visualize, but it is something you can clearly taste—whether it’s properly cooked palov, a fermented drink like wine, or a pickle. Healing from heartbreak is a process, and Recipes for Broken Hearts highlights process-based works, developed through community engagement and a rich public and education program.

With the long-duration production time of many of the contributions to Recipes for Broken Hearts and a focus on time-based mediums such as performance, the exhibition places time as the crucial element in any meaningful encounter with art. The artistic contributions to Recipes for Broken Hearts, all newly commissioned by the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation, tap into the rich intellectual, spiritual, and cultural legacy of Bukhara, revitalizing the many forms of knowledge produced there over the centuries, including its craft traditions, infusing this ancient wisdom with the values of today. Recipes for Broken Hearts seeks to heal unjust divisions between how we see fine and applied arts and how we talk about collaboration. The turbulence of the twentieth century caused much cultural erasure, and working through collectives, guilds, and other forms of both formal and informal cooperatives, women and artisans of Uzbekistan are often the ones who have preserved traditions, knowledge, and spirituality through historical periods of heartbreak.

The first edition of the Bukhara Biennial is imagined as a lively and relational form of exhibition where the energy of the visitors comes into positive contact with the energy of the artists; similar to a feast, a concert, or a parade, your experience of the exhibition is dependent on how you engage with other people with whom you share space and time in Bukhara. We also foreground the arts in culinary arts and invite Uzbek as well as international chefs to showcase the craft of cooking, bringing in flavors from different culinary traditions that empower visitors and participants to understand the complexity of the world from Bukhara through its history with the global spice trade and to savor different recipes that, like salt, reduce the taste of bitterness in the world. Recipes for Broken Hearts celebrates the power we have through small gestures to conjure great transformations, such as our ability to “make someone’s day.” Describing a feast held by an enlightened prince, the fifteenth-century Timurid poet Alisher Navoiy wrote: “Venus was singing and playing there // But the tambourine in her hands was the Sun itself.”[8]Like the feast that Navoiy describes, Recipes for Broken Hearts celebrates the cosmic connections that link us to higher forces that we cannot see, inspiring us to be better companions to the many forms of life we encounter on this planet and infusing us with the energy to imagine a joyful world where everyone’s heart can feel lighter and everyone’s stomach can be full.

[1] Sofia Lemos, ‘On the Practices and Poetics of the Creative Imagination’ in Lemos (Ed.) Meandering. Art, Ecology, and Metaphysics, 2024.

[2] Ibid.

[3] James Pickett, Polymaths of Islam: Power and Networks of Knowledge in Central Asia, 2020.

[4] Bruijn, J.T.P. de, Talat Sait Halman, and Munibur Rahman, ‘S̲h̲ahrangīz’ in P. Bearman (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Islam New Edition Online (EI-2 English), Brill, 2012.

[5] The Iranian writer Ali Akbar Dehkhoda defined the name ‘Bukhara’ as meaning ‘full of knowledge’, in recognition of the city’s profound, enduring resonance for artists, poets, and scholars. 

[6] Razia Sultanova, https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/from-shamanism-to-sufism-9781780766874/, 2014.

[7] Conversation between Ferran Adrià and Marta Arzak in Burrows and Cezar (Ed.) Politics of Food, 2019.

[8] Alisher Navoiy, ‘Hunyogaru nagmasoz Nokhid // Lekin daf aning kulida khurshed’, in Musical Legacy of Uzbekistan in Collections of the Russian Federation, Tashkent, 2017.