Abror Zufarov is a virtuoso instrumentalist who has mastered his performance on the stringed-instruments tanbur, sato and dotâr in both the Tashkent-Fergana and Samarkand-Bukhara schools. He is a grandson of two outstanding and crucial figures in the history of Uzbek classical music: Turgun Alimatov and Usmon Zufarov. Through deep theoretical investigation, Abror Zufarov has taken an enormous interest into safeguarding, revitalizing, and transmitting this intricate cultural legacy to future generations.
Throughout the last 20 years of his professional life, Abror Zufarov has been trying to reconstruct the authentic sound of the tanbur that was lost in the 1930s by reviving the metrical pattern of the instrument, thus bringing an old – new sound to Shashmaqom. In 2021 Abror Zufarov participated in the development of the sound for the first ever Uzbekistan National Pavilion at the Architecture Biennale in Venice. He worked on the sound creation together with Carlos Casas, and was able to bring a new artistic layer to the pavilion.
Charli Tapp is a visual artist and composer currently based in Japan. Active through intimate, obscure, and scattered in-situ performances, movies, and context-based installations, his work behaves as a wandering in cultural interpolation and transposition with a para-political attitude. Utilizing a diverse set of tools and techniques, it explores crevices, rather than utilizing a topic-based perspective, focusing on paradigm shifts, cracks, and disconnect in the fabric of each situation.
Most recently, he held a show at MONO Lisboa (Portugal), and displayed his work at Anagra (Tokyo, Japan). Charli Tapp's works periodically crosses paths with Space Caviar through collaborations among which organizing an experimental composition residency reclaiming a local crater, producing generative sound design, and scoring for the movie Blockchain screened at the Vitra Museum & the Mudac (Switzerland), the MAAT (Portugal), and the MET (USA).