From September 12 to 20, one of the world's largest international design festivals, the London Design Festival (LDF), took place in the UK capital. This year, Uzbekistan participated for the first time — the Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF) supported a public program dedicated to traditional crafts and live performance. Events featuring Uzbek singers and artists were held at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), one of the world's largest museums of applied arts and design.
The London Design Festival was founded in 2003 by designer John Sorrell, co-founder of the design agency Newell and Sorrell, and curator and design expert Ben Evans. The festival pursues two goals — bringing together leading industry professionals and reinforcing London's status as the world design capital. It unfolds not in a single venue but across the entire city, encompassing major cultural institutions including the multi-stage Barbican Centre, the 18th-century neoclassical mansion Somerset House on the Thames where the London Design Biennale is held, and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). It was at this museum that Uzbekistan made its debut.
The public program, organized by ACDF and the V&A, opened on September 16 with a Suzani Demonstration workshop. It was led by traditional suzani master Yulduz Muhiddinova. She told visitors about the styles and visual language of suzani and helped them embroider their own works. According to the master, she was pleased that the museum treats exhibits from Uzbekistan — suzani and other embroidery samples stored in the collection — with great care. According to her, the V&A museum is interested in studying Uzbek applied art.
The program continued on September 18 with the evening event Friday Late: Awakenings. Usually held once a month, it is dedicated to a specific theme. This time the theme was set by the festival itself and by the collaboration between the museum and the foundation — visitors were presented with programs combining modern technology and traditional art. During the evening, Yulduz Muhiddinova conducted two master classes on suzani embroidery. As the final part of the event, singer Laylo performed live twice. She sang songs from the album Roots, presented in November 2025 with the support of the Tashkent Center for Contemporary Art (CCA Tashkent), in English.
In her musical work, Laylo addresses themes such as growing up in a young independent country, societal changes, mixed national identity, and the role of women in society. "When a complex topic is presented in the language of art, it becomes much easier to accept. We begin to reflect on things that are perceived as painful or sharp in ordinary life. For me, this is a way of softly changing views (activism)," says the singer. The Roots album uses Uzbek folk instruments, but in London the compositions were performed with piano accompaniment. "I would very much like to bring an entire orchestra here to show how rich and diverse our music is. I hope we will come here many more times with our creative work," says Laylo.
Both events were held in support of the installation project Sender Unknown by Uzbek artist Aziza Kadyri. This work was created by commission of the museum within the V&A Jameel program dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art at the V&A, with additional support from the Sarikhani family. The Sender Unknown installation consists of two opposing suzanis stretched over curved metal structures suspended in the air. They wind around several columns of the gallery and appear to hover above the display cases. On the fabrics, traditional suzani patterns are juxtaposed with contemporary narratives. One of the fragments depicts women behind sewing machines, a reference to the labor of embroiderer women.
According to the artist, this work is the result of her many years of research into suzani and artificial intelligence, an attempt to understand how modern technologies influence the preservation and loss of cultural memory. Kadyri compares artificial intelligence and suzani: a dataset to a modern archive, and traditional embroidery to the symbolic knowledge of women passed down from generation to generation. According to her, when a human creates something new, they process acquired ideas through their own experience, while artificial intelligence has no such experience. It only generalizes and "homogenizes" data. Aziza Kadyri notes that as a result, many details are lost and over time culture itself may be forgotten. To prevent this, the artist trains AI models and then "returns the result to the craftswomen." In her approach, technology becomes not a tool that makes tradition forgotten, but a means of preserving it.
Source: www.gazeta.uz