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| Bactria Cultural Centre, as a contemporary artistic space, serves as a catalyst by providing opportunities to local artists to express their creativity in an entirely free and experimental way. At present it is the only venue in Dushanbe that encourages artists to apply innovative approaches to manifest their artistic visions. |
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| Bactria Cultural Centre, as the cultural actor of ACTED’s activities, is fully devoted to provide access to information and to vocational training. Educational activities aimed at artists and art professionals are organized with the firm belief that an understanding of national identity as well as social changes and development can originate from active participants of society. The role of an artist is, and always has been, the observer, the analyzer, and the initiator. |
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| One of the main information points in Bactria is its library, which has a collection of books in Tajik, Russian, English, German and French, focusing on mostly culture and history. Art books on the works of Michelangelo, Levitan, Vrubel, Aivazovsky, Theophanes the Greek, movies of Russian and Western avant-garde, and Italian Renaissance are the most valued pieces of the collection. |
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Workshops on curatorial work and on art criticism
 Thanks to the support of organizations like the Open Society Institute (OSI) and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), Tajikistan has seen significant growth in contemporary art projects in recent years. Though the quality of these projects in artistic terms is very high, their value has not been recognized by professional art critics or journalists. This is largely due to the fact that contemporary art is still new to art theorists in Tajikistan. To counteract this situation Bactria Cultural Centre organized two workshops with objectives as the promotion of contemporary art media among Tajik artists; and establishment of a foundation for curatorial work and art criticism of contemporary art in Tajikistan. The workshops focused on topics of curatorial work and on art criticism and art journalism.
The workshop on curatorial work was the first of its kind in Tajikistan. The role of curator is not well understood either by artists or by art critics therefore the workshop was designed for them. The two-day workshop was led by Dastan Kozhahmedov from Soros Contemporary Art Centre in Almaty, Kazakhstan, a recognised Central Asian contemporary art curator. The expected output of this workshop was to establish the practise of curatorial art exhibitions in Tajikistan.
The development of the contemporary artistic process is impossible without the active participation of art critics and specialised mass media. In Tajikistan, many arts events go unnoticed by art critics and mass media. This is not because art critics and journalists do no attend such events. Rather, it is because they cannot professionally write about them due to a lack of knowledge and training on contemporary art.
A five-day workshop was designed for Tajik art critics and art journalists, both practising and students. The goal was to provide these individuals theoretical information and practical advice so they can assess and critique contemporary art for the Tajik media, thereby increasing the profile of contemporary art in the country. This workshop was be led by Oksana Shatalova, an independent contemporary art critic from Kazakhstan whose work has been published in top Central Asian art magazines such as Internet&I, Kurak; on Kazakh and Russian web-sites, and in catalogues of international contemporary art biennales and exhibitions.
The participants - journalists and art historians - had the chance not only to familiarize themselves and learn about art history from modernism to postmodernism, but also to acquire skills to evaluate works from professional and artistic point of views. Besides lectures, the seminar also consisted of a practical approach, where the participants wrote articles, discussed contemporary art pieces and gained practice in art journalism.
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Access to information – Cultural Coordination Meetings
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| Bactria Cultural Centre is engaged in projects that further capacity building and development of music industry in Tajikistan. First of all, it offers a venue to musicians through the organization of regular concerts where they can freely practice their creativity. We impose no limitation in the direction of musical genres, but we do promote world music and experiments based on the combination of traditional and contemporary music. |
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| If the context allows, Bactria Cultural Centre uner the auspices of ACTED, carries out heritage conservation and rehabilitation activities, if the heritage in question has been damaged or suffers from a lack of maintenance due to the difficulties facing the communities. |
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As a result of the continuous degradation of Tajik educational structure, from a unified primary and secondary education under the Soviets, barely 60 percent of Tajikistan’s current school-age population is receiving educational opportunities. Through opportunities for learning and vocational training BACTRIA aims at democratizing access to information and education. |
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Artistic Vision 
