Marinika Babanazarova

Marinika Babanazarova (née Nurmukhamedova) is an art historian and museum professional who directed the Savitsky State Museum of Arts of Karakalpakstan in Nukus for more than three decades. She was born on 7 September 1955 into the family of Marat Nurmukhamedov, a philologist, member of the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR and head of the academy’s Karakalpak branch.

She graduated in English philology from the Romance and Germanic languages faculty of Tashkent State University and, by correspondence, in art history from the Ostrovsky Tashkent Theatre and Art Institute; her thesis was about Igor Savitsky, the painter, art historian and founder of the Nukus museum. From 1977 to 1983 she taught English at Nukus University.

In 1983 she joined the Karakalpak State Museum of Art in Nukus as its academic secretary and chief curator. After the death of the museum’s founder, Igor Savitsky, in 1984, she took charge of it and remained its director until September 2015.

Over those three decades the collection that Savitsky had begun to assemble in the 1950s became known far beyond Uzbekistan: it is regarded as the second-largest collection of Russian avant-garde art in the world, and the museum is often called “the Louvre in the desert”. Babanazarova represented the museum at exhibitions abroad, was one of the main voices of the American documentary “The Desert of Forbidden Art” (2010), and published books on the collection and its founder, including the monograph “Igor Savitsky: Artist, Collector, Founder of the Museum” (London, 2011) in Russian, English and French.

She studied museum work abroad, with training at the Louvre (1998) and the British Museum (2000) and visits to museums in the United States, France, Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands. From 1998 to 2015 she was a member of the Central Election Commission of Uzbekistan. She speaks Russian, English and French.

Her honours include the Uzbek orders “Do‘stlik” (1996) and “For Selfless Service” (2004), the French Order of Arts and Letters (2013) and the title of Honoured Worker of Culture of the Republic of Karakalpakstan.