Uzbekistan Builds a Rose Garden From Thread, Paint & Glass in Doha

At the second edition of Design Doha Biennial, Uzbekistan’s contribution begins with a flower.

‘A Leaf from the Rose Garden’, presented by the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF), brings together Madina Kasimbaeva, Davlat Toshev and Ruben Saakyan inside a traditional courtyard house in Doha’s historic Fereej Al Asmakh district. Across suzani embroidery, miniature painting, ebru and glass art, the exhibition considers how one of the region’s oldest decorative motifs continues to change as it moves between artists, materials and generations.

The exhibition takes its title from the preface to ‘Gulistan’, or ‘The Rose Garden’, written by Persian poet Saadi in 1258. In the text, Saadi contrasts the brief life of a cut flower with the permanence of a garden preserved through writing. ‘A Leaf from the Rose Garden’ carries that idea into craft, looking at how cultural memory can survive through techniques and motifs that are continually practised rather than simply preserved.

Each of its three participating artists approaches that question from a different tradition. Tashkent-based Madina Kasimbaeva is one of Uzbekistan’s best-known contemporary practitioners of suzani, the Central Asian tradition of silk-thread embroidery. Her work draws particularly on Tashkent’s palak style, in which bold circular forms associated with the sun and moon sit alongside flowers, vines, pomegranates and other motifs. Kasimbaeva also produces her own natural dyes and has established workshops through which she has trained hundreds of younger embroiderers.

Davlat Toshev approaches ornament through the Bukhara school of miniature painting. A miniaturist and manuscript restorer, Toshev has spent decades working with historic books, paintings and traditional techniques, while introducing contemporary subjects into the form. During a recent residency at Doha’s Museum of Islamic Art, he described miniature painting as a means of preserving “history, culture, and the memory of generations”, while producing new work that brought the Bukhara tradition into dialogue with the architecture, landscape and visual culture he encountered in Qatar.

Ruben Saakyan comes to the flower more literally. An artist and florist with a background in painting, his practice centres on the role and representation of flowers in Uzbekistan’s social and visual culture. His work has also moved beyond living material: a previous collaboration with Murano glassmakers used more than 500 handmade glass elements to reinterpret Bukhara embroidery, extending floral and textile imagery into sculptural form.

Placed together in Fereej Al Asmakh, these practices give the exhibition’s garden metaphor several different lives. The flower can be stitched into cloth, rendered in miniature, treated through ebru or reconstructed in glass, with the exhibition using those shifts in material to examine what changes - and what remains recognisable - when a visual tradition is handed from one maker to another.

“‘A Leaf from the Rose Garden’ reflects an idea central to our work at ACDF: that cultural heritage is sustained through the people who continue to practise, reinterpret and transform it,” says Gayane Umerova, Chairperson of ACDF. “Ruben Saakyan, Madina Kasimbaeva and Davlat Toshev each bring a distinct artistic language to the exhibition, demonstrating how centuries-old traditions continue to inspire new forms of creative expression.”

The exhibition also arrives at the beginning of a longer relationship between ACDF and Qatar Museums. The organisations signed a five-year cooperation agreement in September 2026, with plans for artist residencies, masterclasses, design conversations and other programmes connecting cultural practitioners in Uzbekistan and Qatar.

It follows ACDF’s participation in the inaugural Design Doha Biennial in 2024 with ‘Crafting Uzbekistan: Tradition in Threads’, which explored textile and wood craftsmanship through historical artefacts and contemporary design. This time, rather than surveying several traditions at once, ‘A Leaf from the Rose Garden’ uses a single recurring motif to trace the different directions those traditions can take in contemporary hands.

‘A Leaf from the Rose Garden’ is on view at Design Doha Biennial from November 5th, 2026 to January 31st, 2027.