Saodat Ismailova
Saodat Ismailova (b. 1981, Tashkent, Uzbekistan) studied film and video direction at the State Institute of Arts in Tashkent. In recent years, she has exhibited at Sharjah Biennial 15 (2023), the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), documenta fifteen (2022), and in solo exhibitions at Swiss Institute, NY, 2026, Portikus, Frankfurt 2026, Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan (2023 /24), Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam (2023), Le Fresnoy in Tourcoing (2023), Center for Contemporaray Arts, Tashkent, 2019 among others. . Her works can be found in the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate Modern, London, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the FRAC in France, Pinault Collection, France, the Almaty Museum of Arts, and Tselinny Temporary in Almaty among others.
As We Fade
2024
24 panels of silk, two-channel video projection
115 × 147 × 1150 cm
20:39 min
Courtesy the artist
As We Fade by Saodat Ismailova (b. 1981, Tashkent) unfolds as a layered projection of memory, ritual, and historical continuity. Filmed on Sulaiman-Too, a sacred mountain in the city of Osh , the work draws on a landscape shaped by its deep cultural significance, ethnic diversity, and turbulent histories surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union. Osh itself represents a fragile geographic knot – one of the most densely populated areas in Central Asia– and remains crucial to its political and social stability. Here, the mountain becomes both witness and archive.
The film interweaves contemporary recordings of ancient rituals with archival footage from 1929. Through careful editing, bodies move across time in a continuous, almost cyclical rhythm. Gestures repeat, echo, and overlap, suggesting that history does not simply pass, but lingers, reappearing in altered forms.
Presented as an installation of 24 suspended silk panels, the work extends beyond the screen into space. Each layer carries a fragment of the moving image. Figures appear, dissolve, and re-emerge, as if memory itself were shifting before the viewer’s eyes. The translucent fabric allows scenes to bleed into one another, creating moments where past and present become indistinguishable.
In As We Fade, visibility is never fixed. Reflecting Ismailova’s practice at large, the work traces how suppressed or forgotten narratives persist within landscapes, bodies, and rituals, (re)emerging in fragmented and poetic forms.