Melted into the Sun, Saodat Ismailova (2024) (EMPIRE LINES x Fondazione In Between Art Film, Venice Biennale)

Filmmaker Saodat Ismailova traces stories of spirituality, dissent, and environmental extraction around the Aral Sea from post-Soviet Uzbekistan and Central Asia, via Melted into the Sun (2024).

Uzbekistan is at the crossroads of diverse material histories and migratory legacies. Part of ‘Central Asia’ - first defined by the Prussian geographer Alexander von Humboldt in 1843 - the region was governed by the Uzbek branch of the Soviet Russian Communist Party in the 20th century, until the Union’s collapse in 1990. As one of the first gener­ations of post-Soviet Central Asian contemporary artists, Saodat Ismailova often draws on shared traditions and transnational connections with groups including Uyghurs in China, to Arabic communities further west, distinguishing between migration and displacement in her practice.

From her documentary, Aral: Fishing in an Invisible Sea (2004), to her more recent works on Chillpiq, we discuss the cultural importance of water in this double landlocked country; the Aral Sea, now the Aral Desert, was one of the world’s largest lakes until the Soviet government steadily diverted its water sources, reducing it to 10% of its original size. Her most recent film focusses on Al-Muqanna (The Veiled One), an 8th century textile dyer and alchemist who became a ‘protosocialist’ political revolutionary in now-Iran. We consider the syncretism of religions and faiths including Islam, Zoroastrianism and Mazdakism, Buddhism, and Christianity, as evidence of cosmopolitan coexistence within empires, and how this figure was appropriated in 20th century communist propaganda.

Saodat shares her interests in oriental classical music, and improvision within maqam and raga, as living archives ‘deadened’ by notation, alongside archaeology, and the number 40. We discuss her collaborative practice with Davra Collective at documenta in Kassel. From her first residency with Fabrica, to her participation in the Venice Biennale in 2013 as part of the Central Asian Pavilion, Saodat explains her long connection with Italy, ‘the start of her life in Europe'.

Saodat Ismailova’s film, Melted into the Sun (2024), is on view as part of Nebula, produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film, which runs at Complesso dell’Ospedaletto in Venice until 24 November 2024.

Part of EMPIRE LINES at Venice, a series of episodes leading to Foreigners Everywhere (Stranieri Ovunque), the 60th Venice Biennale or International Art Exhibition in Italy, in April 2024.

For more about Zoroastrianism, listen to Dr. Talinn Grigor on Persian Revival architecture, and Parsi patronage in India, via the Vatcha Adaran Zoroastrian Fire Temple in Bombay (Mumbai) (1881).

On music, memory, and history, hear Barbican curator Eleanor Nairne on Julianknxx’s Chorus in Rememory of Flight (2023), and Professor Paul Gilroy, on The Black Atlantic (1993-Now).

Find out more about textiles and embroidery across Central and South West Asia and North Africa with Rachel Dedman, curator of Material Power: Palestinian Embroidery at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge and the Whitworth in Manchester:

On an ⁠UNRWA Dress from Ramallah, Palestine (1930s)⁠, on EMPIRE LINES.

On the exhibition more widely, in this gowithYamo article.

Hear Nil Yalter, awardee of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2024, and fellow Paris-practicing artist, at Ab Anbar during London Gallery Weekend 2023, with ⁠Exile is a Hard Job (1974-Now)⁠.

WITH: Saodat Ismailova, filmmaker and artist who lives and works between Tashkent, Uzbekistan and Paris, France. She is the initiator of the educational program CCA Lab, Tashkent Film Encounters, and the DAVRA research group, which is dedicated to studying, documenting, and disseminating Central Asian culture and knowledge.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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