Saodat Ismailova

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Saodat Ismailova
Stains of Oxus, 2016
Three-channel video installation, 22:31
Supported by L’Ambassade de France au Pakistan [Embassy of France to Pakistan]

Stains of Oxus takes viewers on a journey along the greatest Central Asian River, the Amu Darya – known from Greek times as the Oxus – from its birth in icy Tajikistan to its death in the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan, now largely a desert. Along the way, the viewer encounters people who share their dreams of the river, and to whom whispering one’s thoughts and dreams to its waters is a morning ritual and an ancient local tradition.  Ismailova’s installation locates the poetics of water at the critical intersection of hydropolitics and the politics of memory, suggesting the ways that ecological disaster also means cultural loss.

 

Saodat Ismailova (b. 1981) is a filmmaker and artist living and working between Tashkent and Paris. Her work addressing themes of national memory, women’s empowerment, ritualism, and mortality, inspired by ancestral knowledge, folklore, animism, and regional spiritual practices, her work has been shown at Center for Contemporary Art, Tashkent (2019), documenta fifteen (2022), and Sharjah Biennial (2023), among other exhibitions. In 2022, she founded the DAVRA collective, who are also taking part in LB03. This is her first time exhibiting in Pakistan.

 

The Haunted, 2017
Single-channel video, 23:22
Supported by L’Ambassade de France au Pakistan [Embassy of France to Pakistan]

The Haunted is a cinematic letter to the “soul of the last Turan Tiger,” a subspecies that went extinct after centuries of hunting and habitat loss under Russian tsarist colonization and Soviet modernization in Central Asia. The tiger is still worshiped today as a sacred animal by locals, and through a montage of archival and present-day footage, Ismailova addresses its spiritual force to conjure the Central Asian world of yesterday. Screened in the historic Lahore Fort, The Haunted taps into the collective imaginary of the tiger and its broadly enduring symbolism even now.

 

Saodat Ismailova (b. 1981) is a filmmaker and artist living and working between Tashkent and Paris. Her work addressing themes of national memory, women’s empowerment, ritualism, and mortality, inspired by ancestral knowledge, folklore, animism, and regional spiritual practices, her work has been shown at Center for Contemporary Art, Tashkent (2019), documenta fifteen (2022), and Sharjah Biennial (2023), among other exhibitions. In 2022, she founded the DAVRA collective, who are also taking part in LB03. This is her first time exhibiting in Pakistan.

Written and directed by Saodat Ismailova

Produced by Leif Magne Tangen

Photography and editing by Saodat Ismailova

Text editing by Ulugbek Sadikov

 

Music by Camille Norment

Sound design and mix by Cato Langnes

Title design by arc Leipzig/Berlin

Translations by Ibrat Jomabaev, Kirill Kuzmin, Theodore Levin

 

Special thanks to: Carlos Casas, Sibel Martinez Ismailova, Filipa Ramos, Tursun Ismailova