Saodat Ismailova

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Stains of Oxus, 2016
Three-channel video
23:30

 

The Haunted, 2017
Single-channel video installation

 

Stains of Oxus evokes an oneiric journey through the greatest Central Asian River, Amu Darya – known from Greek times as Oxus, portraying the transformation of landscape and witnessing people who inhabit its riverbanks. The film starts at the birth of the river on the high plateau of Tajikistan and moves to the lowland deserts in Uzbekistan, where the river finds its death in the Aral Sea. A collection of dreams that is by local tradition shared with flowing water, and practiced as a first morning ritual, is captured and tightens the narration. While the river disappears into the desert. Stains of Oxus is a poetic film installation that facts dramatic hydro politics of the Soviet past. 

Saodat Ismailova is a filmmaker and artist, born in 1981, and 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, has been shown at the Venice Biennale, documenta fifteen, Sharjah Biennial, 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 is a soulful cinematic video essay on the Turan Tiger, an extinct subspecies of tigers. It addresses its almost hallucinatory force to conjure up the mythological, Central Asian world of yesterday. In Ismailova’s own words, “The Haunted is an intimate video letter to the spirit of the extinct Turan tiger, which disappeared from Central Asia in the twentieth century. Today, the tiger lives on in people’s collective memory.” The Turan Tiger was a unique subspecies of tiger that inherited Central Asia. The demise of the tiger began with the Russian tsarist colonization of Turkestan in the late 19th century, and continued throughout Soviet times. The last Turanian Tiger was seen in the late 1960s in Karalkalpakstan, the Northwestern region of Uzbekistan, where local people still worship and respect it as a sacred animal. Screened here in the historic Lahore Fort, which has witnessed centuries of regimes and colonial rule, The Haunted taps into the collective imaginary of the tiger and its enduring symbolism in present-day Pakistan.

Saodat Ismailova is a filmmaker and artist, born in 1981, and 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, has been shown at the Venice Biennale, documenta fifteen, Sharjah Biennial, 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.