Antony gormley

In the ruins of a 16th-century mosque, in the heart of the ancient silk-road city of Bukhara, dozens of abstract figures stand mute and motionless. As the desert sun dips below the horizon, and the shadows thicken, the effect is eerie. Wandering among the statues alone, you feel as though you’ve stumbled upon the aftermath of a forgotten, inscrutable rite. But these aren’t Ozymandian relics. They’re an artwork, ‘Close’, installed last summer by the British sculptor Antony Gormley. His work was one of more than 200 scattered across the Unesco World Heritage city as part of the inaugural Bukhara Biennial, which ran from 5 September to 23 November last year.

Antony Gormley: In the beginning was the thing! The reason I chose sculpture as a vocation was to escape words, to communicate in a physical way. It was a means of confronting the way things were, of getting to know them in material terms. The origins of making physical objects go back to before the advent of Homo sapiens, earlier even than the appearance of our Neanderthal cousins. Sculpture emerges from material culture. At the beginning there was an urge to make objects and you could argue that making them was the catalyst for the emergence of the modern mind. Martin Gayford: The earliest sculpture so far discovered is often