The exhibit of the Central Asia pavilion Lingua Franca/Франк Тили presenting works of eleven artists from four countries of the region is a comprehensive study of contemporary artistic practices as a kind of lingua franca – language of global communication. The exhibit’s curators propose two approaches deconstructing one another. The first one inspired and motivated by the practices of the early 20th century avant-garde that viewed creation of universal means of communication amongst its major aspirations, presents art works and projects as individual artistic strategies to convert the local issues and contexts into universally comprehensive visual language. These approaches, presented in the exhibit’s major section, Lingua Franca. Experiences of Universal, involve atomization and miscegenation, language of metaphors and archetypes, tracing back to avant-garde, as well as a strategy that appeals to the universality of unformulated order, which was marked in the exhibit as l’innommable.

Lingua franca inspires the metaphor of overall language, but historically and in contemporary practice it remains the language of Franks (франк тили, if translated into Turkic languages of Central Asia), foreigners, others, aliens. This aspect of arts, taken as a model for universal communication, is explored in another section of the exhibition - Франк тили. Foreign Affairs. Projects that built up this part of the exhibit reveal unobvious or sometimes just unnoticed expressions of power, hegemony and domination that run through languages, arts, media and situations that claim to be universal and comprehensive.