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Saodat Ismailova

Saodat Ismailova is a filmmaker and artist who came of age in the post-Soviet era and has established artistic lives between Tashkent and Paris. Skillfully interweaving myths, rituality, and dreams within the tapestry of everyday life, Ismailova’s films investigate the historically complex and layered culture of Central Asia, at the crossroads of diverse material histories and migratory legacies.

After graduating from Tashkent State Art Institute, Ismailova was granted a residency at Fabrica, a research and communication center in Italy. There she co-directed Aral: Fishing in an Invisible Sea, which won Best Documentary at the 2004 Turin Film Festival. In 2005, she was awarded a place in the DAAD Artists-in-Residence Program in Berlin, where she developed her debut award-winning feature film, 40 Days of Silence, which premiered at Forum Expanded, Berlin International Film Festival, in 2014. She participated in the 2013 Venice Biennale as part of the Central Asian Pavilion with her video installation Zukhra. In 2017, Ismailova was artist-in-residence in OCA (Office for Contemporary Art Norway), where she developed her short film The Haunted, presented the same year at Tromsø Kunesteforening in Norway. In 2018, she graduated from Le Fresnoy, France’s National Studio for Contemporary Arts, where she developed Stains of Oxus and Two Horizons. In the same year, her multimedia performance Qyrq Qyz (Forty Girls), produced by the Aga Khan Music Initiative, was presented at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) in New York and Musée du quai Branly in Paris.

In 2021, Ismailova presented the solo exhibition What Was My Name? at Aspan Gallery, Almaty, and curated the educational program CCA Lab at the Center for Contemporary Art, Tashkent, where she had presented the solo exhibition Q’org’on Chirog in 2020. In 2022, Ismailova participated in The Milk of Dreams, the 59th Venice Biennale, with the film Chillahona, and in documenta fifteen in Kassel with new work Chilltan and Bibi Seshanbe. That year, she was awarded the Eye Art & Film Prize by Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, where she presented 18,000 Worlds, the first comprehensive retrospective of her installation work. Later that year, she presented her solo exhibition Double Horizons at Le Fresnoy.