The removal of billboards covering traditional mosaics from the facades of buildings in the Uzbek capital has become a popular event at advertising festivals. Meanwhile, the Council of Ministers approved a decree to include them in the list of monumental art objects that must be preserved.
Tashkent () – The event to release mosaics on the walls of Tashkent buildings, which were hidden by advertising billboards, has already won two social advertising festivals, the Georgian AdBlackSea and the Kazakh Red Jolbors. The Uzbek contest is called Mosaicvertising, organized by the khokimat (city council) of the capital of Uzbekistan. At the creativity festival held in Batumi, Georgia last September, Mosaic won the Grand Prize and the gold medal in the media classification, in the print and outdoor use sector, in which 119 projects participated, the prize of which was a work of art made with plastic collected on the beaches of the Black Sea.
The AdBlackSea festival has been held regularly since 2015 and is very popular among businesses and marketers. Among the winners of the different editions are other projects from Uzbekistan, but also from Slovenia, Bulgaria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Georgia and other countries. In the most recent edition, held in Kazakhstan, Mosaicvertising won three gold medals in the categories of Press Campaign, Esg Projects, Reputation and Behavioral Communication, and three bronze medals in the categories of Media Campaign, Print and Outdoor and Experience Brand and Activation. Altogether, the Tashkent Mosaics were described by everyone as “the heroes of the festivals.”
The great success of Uzbekistan was possible thanks to the collaboration of state institutions and private organizations, one of the most repeated reasons for the policy of President Šavkat Mirziyoyev, who also brought together numerous civil associations that mobilized citizens enthusiastic about the “liberation” of facades and the popularization of traditional mosaics. A collaboration that the khokimat assures was born spontaneously and not artificially, as a “united mission of love for the city and its popular art.”
On the initiative of the Fund for the Development of Culture and Art and the Cultural Heritage Agency, the mosaics were included in the list of heritage sites of Uzbekistan, and the municipal department of digital development created a special site for the mosaics, with animations and additional additions created by artificial intelligence. The event was developed thanks to the marketing agency Lokals Central Asia and the payment service Payme, with authors of musical compositions that resonated in the presentation videos, by the collective Luod373 & Vagan. At the head of the Mosaicvertising information service was publicist Fotima Abdurakhmanova, the first supporter of the initiative for years.
The removal of the advertising billboards that covered the mosaics, according to the Khokimat press service, had been completed in June after more than two months of work, thus concluding a process that had begun in 2021 and that had allowed dozens of billboards to be dismantled. and finally release more than 200 painted facades. In March, the Council of Ministers of Uzbekistan had approved a decree to include mosaics from Tashkent and other Uzbek cities in the lists of monumental artistic objects that must be preserved. Most of them are found in the capital’s Almazar and Šajkhantakur districts, and the definitive catalog contains information on nearly 500 mosaics, including several dozen that have been lost, but for which visual evidence and other documentation survive.
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