Children Are the Flowers of Life is an evolving interdisciplinary project by Franco-Uzbek artist Khulkar Yunusova. Rooted in the Central Asian metaphor of children as the flowers of life and informed by the artist’s seven years of experience in paediatric oncology, the project brings together children’s thoughts, dreams and unrealised futures.
Through textile, drawing, sound, video, ceramics, artist’s books and participatory installations, Yunusova creates a growing garden in which each flower carries a child’s word, image or imagined future. Rather than representing children through illness, loss or vulnerability, the project recognises them as subjects of knowledge, memory and cultural imagination.
Developed across different countries and languages, the work invites local communities to contribute their own stories, proverbs and visions of childhood. It examines how societies protect, transmit or neglect the futures entrusted to them, asking: what does it mean to call children the flowers of life if not every child is given the possibility to bloom?