Saodat Ismailova

Saodat Ismailova was born in 1981, in Tashkent, the capital of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic.[1][2][3][4][5] She developed a passion for cinema at an early age, inspired by her father, an Uzbek cinematographer, and her grandmother, a storyteller.[1][6] Ismailova studied film at the Uzbekistan State Institute of Arts and Culture, where she became a fan of the work of Soviet filmmakers Sergei Parajanov and Andrei Tarkovsky, who had broken from the established style of Soviet realism in favour of expressionist and existentialist themes.[1] In 1999, she won the Grand Prize at the Tashkent Film Festival.[5]

After graduating from the institute, she moved to Treviso in Italy, where she began work for the Fabrica research centre.[5][7][8][9][10] She also took charge of making documentary films about Central Asian music for Smithsonian Folkways.[9] In 2004, she collaborated with Carlos Casas on her first documentary film Aral: Fishing in an Invisible Sea, which followed Kazakh and Uzbek fishermen as they dealt with the degradation of the titular Aral Sea.[1] The film won the award for Best Documentary at the Torino Film Festival.[2][5][7][8] The following year, she joined the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, in which she started development on a feature film.[7][8][9][10] In 2008, she formed the Central Asian production company MAP.[10] In 2011, she attempted to shoot this feature in Uzbekistan, but had to film in Tajikistan for production reasons.[6]

She gained worldwide recognition at the 2013 Venice Biennale for the video installation Zukhra,[1][2][4][6][5][7][8][11] in which a woman recounts the history of Uzbekistan while lying in bed.[1] For the film, she was awarded a $30,000 prize by Amsterdam's EYE Filmmuseum.[1] The following year, she released her debut feature film, 40 Days of Silence,[1][6][5][11] which she had developed at the Sundance Institute in Utah.[5][9][11] The film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival,[8][11] where it was nominated for best debut film.[2][5]

In 2017, she was artist-in-residence at the Norwegian Office for Contemporary Art and made a short film The Haunted,[5][7][8] which covered the extinction of the Turan tiger.[6][5][11][12][13] She also graduated from the French Contemporary Arts Studio Le Fresnoy,[5] where she had made Stains of Oxus and Two Horizons.[8][7] She then put together the multimedia piece Qyrq Qyz, which retold a Central Asian legend of 40 warrior women,[14][6] and was debuted Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) New York, and later at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris.[8][5][7]

In 2019, Ismailova exhibited Q’org’on Chirog at the Central for Contemporary Arts in Tashkent (CCAT); she also put together an educational program on contemporary art in Taskhent that lasted a year. [8] The following year, she produced the film Her Five Lives for the Asian Film Archive, which charted the history of Women in Uzbekistan.[1]

In 2021, Ismailova established the DAVRA collective, which brought together artists from throughout Central Asia,[1][3][7][12][15] in order to document and publicise local culture.[7][8][12] Ismailova participated in DAVRA's 40-day program at Documenta fifteen, where they shared their research on Chilltans, a kind of spirit in Central Asian folklore.[3][16] That same year, Ismailova had a solo exhibition at Aspan Gallery, Almaty, titled What was my name?.[8][7]

Ismailova exhibited another work at the 2022 Venice Biennale:[2][8][17] Chillahona a three channel video with a reimagined Tashkent traditional Embroidery, film is dedicated to perestroika years in Uzbekistan. Saodat Ismailova was invited to documenta fifteen, as the only Central Asian representative, she made a film which is Central Asian retelling of Cinderella.[1] That same year, she was awarded £25,000 by the EYE Filmmuseum,[2][5] where she exhibited a collection of her work, titled 18,000 Worlds.[18]

Her films are in the collections of Centre Pompidou, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Almaty, Museum of Art.