The project aims to encourage young artists to develop a nonstandard vision of the world and interpretation of reality, and to give them skills to come up with original solutions to artistic problems. The project helps to gage the artists’ real creative potential and determine the level of development of postmodernist visions within national art.

The target art categories include painting, video art, installations and fashion design. On display are works by a group of young artists from Uzbekistan working in various contemporary art categories and techniques: from painting and video art to installations and fashion design. These include artists, aged 25-45, who have shown exceptionally creative and original thinking skills.

The project draws on Aristotle’s teachings on mimesis, which he defined as the perfection and imitation of nature. Art is not only imitation but also the use of mathematical ideas and symmetry in the search for the perfect and the timeless. It is this teaching that came as a groundwork for the development of global realistic art. Speaking of canons of art in the imitation of nature and living beings, Aristotle accentuated the importance of following real forms and sizes of a particular object. He stated that an extremely large creature is not beautiful because one cannot get a full visual grasp of it immediately, but its oneness and wholeness for the viewers would be lost if the creature, for example, had “ten thousand stages of length”.

Aristotle, thus, maintained that depicting a cow’s head as having a length of 2,000 kilometers may not be considered art. Notwithstanding the ironic nature of the example, it touches upon a pivotal conceptual issue in arts: the limitation of individual capabilities and imagination by established dogmas.

Given the breadth of themes, the participating artists have been tasked with focusing their attention on one theme – the cow – which they are to interpret in unrealistic terms and sizes. To some extent, the exhibition’s game-like nature does not diminish its conceptual base.

The history of global arts has examples of conscious departure from these rules (Gothic art, Mannerism, Baroque, Impressionism, Cubism, etc.) that sought to preserve an autonomy of artistic space and artistic self-expression. The peak of this resistance to antique aesthetics is seen in surrealism and Russian avant-garde, clearly reflected in the works by Spain’s eminent Surrealist Salvador Dali as well as Black Square of Russia’s Suprematist artist Kazimir Malevich. This anti-mimetic tendency has become dominant in the entire European art of the 20th century, which works to develop the contemporary art of postmodernism concept-wise. Uzbekistan’s 20th-century art moved strictly within the confines of social realism, which was founded by the antique aesthetics of mimesis. Naturally, this suppressed artists’ inner artistic aspirations. Independence gained by Uzbekistan enabled national artists to broaden their visions of art and master new principles and forms that are characteristic of global contemporary art. This approach allows for both contemporary trends in arts and categories relating to modelers, designers, jewellery masters, etc.