Saodat Ismailova: Melted into the Sun is the first major solo museum presentation in the United States by film and installation artist Saodat Ismailova. These recent works highlight Ismailova’s ongoing interest in Central Asia’s traditions, oral histories, and landscapes. Her camera’s eye shifts from the banks of the Amu Darya River to ancient ruins and Soviet-era power stations. Ancient Iranian and Islamic philosophies as well as her own family stories ground her explorations of Central Asia’s complicated modern history. Nineteenth-century Uzbek ikats (fabric wall hangings) from the museum’s collections are displayed alongside her works to evoke a vivid sense of place and the resilience of culture.
Ismailova creates a space between dream and reality through images, sounds, and textures from both past and present. Weaving text, archival film, and her own footage, she explores the cyclical nature of time and the human impact on the environment. Her work ultimately invites you to reflect on the role of the past and memory in understanding your place in an unstable world.
Artist-Selected Objects
Saodat Ismailova’s work evolves from extensive research into objects, archives, and oral histories. To gain further insight into her practice, we invited her to make a selection from the museum’s historic collection of art from Central and Western Asia. Each object conjures a past richly layered with traditions and ways of seeing the world, from a fourteenth-century painting of a mysterious talking tree to a nineteenth-century begging bowl which has disappeared from the public space. Ismailova’s reflections on these objects illuminate her process of creating visually and aurally haunting spaces where history, myth, and memory unite.
Support is provided by Richard Price and Yung Chang.
