Saodat Ismailova: Abyss Between Two Mountains

Time: museum hours

Admission: with museum entrance

This exhibition extends beyond the festival dates. It is on view from March 1 – May 5th. 

More information on museum website

Saodat Ismailova is an Uzbek filmmaker and artist who weaves memories, myths, rituals and dreams into the tapestry of everyday life. Growing up as the first post-Soviet generation in Central Asia, Ismailova has made the region the subject of her work, investigating its historically complex and layered cultures and geographies. Abyss Between Two Mountains brings together films, installations, and woven materials to explore the role of mountains within her body of work, examining them as the confluences between several continuums of time. The mountain and its vertical pull conjures a sense of mystical time, a force against the ever-expanding and forward trajectory of modernity and recent history. 

Drawing on her personal story, ancestral knowledge, and oral histories of women, she creates hypnotic images that take us from the spaces between mountains, places that are marked by geological transitions and cultural artifacts–the central Asian steppe, the banks of the Amu Darya river, and the sacred mountain of Sulaiman-Too, which is the most ancient worship site in the region. The Zoroastrian burial ground of Chillpiq features in several of the works and serves as a bridge between threads of time. Combining new video footage with archival material in works such as As We Fade (2024), she explores how systems of knowledge have been suppressed and even erased by globalized modernity and ecologies threatened. To reflect on this void, or what Mexican post/decolonial theorist Rolando Vázquez calls “an abyss of erasure,” Ismailova “inscribes a gesture of hope, the hope of re-membering as consciousness and the hope of transmission in the face of artifice.” From projecting on silk and allowing an image to fade into the textile to creating stacked multi-channel installations, she uses the apparatus of film to suture any severed ties between the landscape and historical memory and convey a circular sense of time.

Photo: Saodat Ismailova, Melted into the Sun, 2024