At the height of the Aral Sea’s decline, the Karakalpak writer Allayar Darmenov, then eighteen years old, turned to one of humanity’s oldest tools for making sense of environmental change: the invention of mythologies. In his stories, swordfish visit the remnants of saxaul forests and race through the water, remembering the days when the desert prevailed. His depictions of life in a regenerated Aral inhabit a space where fairy tales correspond to reality, and where imagination becomes a form of action.

Inspired by his approach, the National Pavilion of Uzbekistan at the 2026 Venice Biennale constructs a new myth of the Aral Sea, supported by a newly commissioned body of writing by Darmenov. Bringing together artists from Uzbekistan — including the Autonomous Republic of Karakalpakstan, home to the southern part of the Aral — and from the wider Asian region, the pavilion creates myths to reclaim the freedom of imagination and fiction. The Aral’s decline, caused by water extraction for agriculture, is both specific to the region and reflective of broader global ecological upheavals. In this sense, the pavilion and its catalogue invite local and international artists alike to approach the Aral as a shared ground for myth-making and climate resilience.

Working across installation, interactive works, and painting, the pavilion’s artists — Jahongir Bobokulov, Zi Kakhramonova, Aygul Sarsen, Zulfiya Spowart, Xin Liu, A.A. Murakami, and Nguyen Phuong Linh — engage their ecological imagination to learn with and from the Aral Sea.