Artist Talk with Saodat Ismailova

The tickets for the Artist Talk can be purchased on the museum's website or at the ticket office.

Saodat Ismailova is an Uzbek filmmaker and artist whose work explores the relationships between memory, perception, mythology, and the moving image. Drawing on the intellectual and oral traditions of Central Asia, alongside dreams, rituals, and historical archives, she investigates how forms of knowledge survive erasure, political rupture, and historical transformation, shaping individual and collective consciousness across generations. Working across film, installation, sculpture, and sound, she creates works in which documentary and myth, history and lived experience, the visible and the invisible converge, treating memory not as a record of the past but as a living force that continually reshapes reality.

Her visual language draws on Uzbek poetic cinema, blending expressive aesthetics with rich symbolism. These qualities are exemplified in her single-channel film Her Right, presented in the museum’s Mediaroom. The work explores the Soviet Hujum campaign, launched in 1924. Repurposing footage from classic Uzbek films, Ismailova examines the campaign’s complex impact.