Taking its title from the Uzbek city of Bukhara and the Sanskrit word for monastery (vihara), Bukhara & Vihara is a modular wooden sculpture comprised of four parts, each of which slots into another, akin to a child’s toy. The work was inspired by an actual architectural structure that served as a site of worship over the years – for Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Muslims and Jews – and now exists as a museum that attracts tourists. Here, Meldibekov considers the building’s heretical, sacred and secular associations, from antiquity to the present day.

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