After a five-year hiatus, Asia Contemporary Art Forum's (ACAF) FIELD MEETING series returned with its most transformative chapter: FIELD MEETING Take 7: Thinking Pilgrimage. Shifting from the series' high-energy lecture-performances at leading institutions, this edition brought together eighteen artists, curators, collectors, and spiritual practitioners for a contemplative, caravan-style journey across Uzbekistan's sacred cities and landscapes—Khiva, Samarkand, Bukhara, and Tashkent—anchored through site-specific meditations, performative dialogues, activations, and healing rituals.

 

As participants traversed architectural marvels and elemental landscapes long revered by seekers, the journey opened the “field” as both a geographical site and a shared state of consciousness, inviting pilgrimage to function as a curatorial method—a liminal terrain through which knowledge could be shared, embodied, and co-created. Within this framework, art-making and curating unfolded as practices of inquiry, exploring how tradition and innovation might converge, how the boundaries of ego might soften, and how new forms of collective awareness might emerge. At the heart of the project was ACAF Director and curator Leeza Ahmady’s concept of Sufi Fluxus: a continuum of spiritual play, critical humor, and creative experimentation rooted in centuries-old Sufi traditions and ancestral knowledge. Through poetry, music, ritual, and pilgrimage, the program traced resonances between these living practices and concerns later explored by Fluxus artists—dissolving boundaries between art and life, challenging hierarchies, and privileging lived experience over objects. The Sufi figure Mullah Nasrudin—both trickster and sage—served as a guiding presence, embodying a mode of transformation in which humor, paradox, revelation, absurdity, and insight flow together.

 

Full Curatorial Reflection & Photo Documentation HERE

 

See Full Documentation of Offerings & Activations by Participating Artists in their Profile Pages BELOW