Twisting and curving as water

“Dreams are a very important fabric of the Central Asian soul, they are a bridge to the past and to the future, and they contain a key to understanding who we are and where we are going, that is why I work on the idea of reproducing dreams, using sound, recreating those whispers that are the memory of my grandmother and possibly of all women.” Saodat Ismailova

Precisely at the mid-point of Stains of Oxus (2016-19) appears a wooden bridge. The water is moving slowly, very slowly, rather as if there were streams flowing at different speeds. First horizontal, then vertical, as if from a spring, then in different directions on three screens, finally horizontal again, without further reference to the landscape, entirely abstract. Playing in the background at different levels are voices and music.

Stains of Oxus is an installaton consisting of three screens, each time presented in a different way depending on the conditions of the space housing it. For Kunstenfestivaldesarts it has been re-edited and shown as a film.

Saodat Ismailova’s body of work is extremely intricate. Dreams, memories, rites, tongues, sleep, lethargy and death thicken and then dissolve, as if in rhythm with a mysterious shared breathing, ever-changing among film, shorts, installation and performance. Her shows are staged based on compositions of screens, as if providing temporary shelters, physically dividing the space with other viewers in a gentle, but unavoidable physical proximity.

So the bridge sequence in Stains of Oxus could be the long tail to Zukhra (2013), the first work by Saodat Ismailova not conceived for the movie theatre. A sleeping girl, lying on a bed, is filmed from in front. Towards the end, on the wall behind her shoulders, appear scarcely legible images which slowly dissolve into each other, like photographs and ghosts of past time. This is the link: the water flowing in the river, in Stains of Oxus, is the wall on which memories, or perhaps dreams, melt into each other. Sharing dreams in the water of the river is a recollection from Saodat Ismailova’s childhood, a tradition in Central Asia. The journey of the Amu-Darya/Oxus river across different territories and countries every day, is doubtless the bed carrying the imagination of an entire people. And both Zukhra and Stains of Oxus are the artist’s personal collections: an imaginary journey through the dream of a girl, for an indefinitely open time (does she sleep? The light is constantly changing, perhaps she is hypnotised, or in lethargy?), a real journey undertake by the artist along a river, from its source to its mouth, in the daily rites and imagination of a people. In their dialogue, between an interior open to the past, and a landscape flowing along its course, the two works share a concern for the dream, which forms a delicate but foundational presence. Zukhra is a collection of sound sources of various kinds, voices, both adults and a little girl, radio broadcasts, a barking dog, cawing rooks and poignant judgements (a male voice recites “Lenin never came to Turkestan; he didn’t know our languages, traditions, habits, never saw our sky, never heard our songs…”). Music, gentle but always present, now rises, now falls, inhabiting the work like the sound track of a horror film, reaching a crescendo for a finale in which the protagonist’s body disappears, leaving space in the darkness of the sky, illuminated by a single burning star. The sound is thus handled in an unusual and particular way, generating the main question of the work: where does this happen, this path through time, and which we can define as “the film”? Is it taking place “inside” the outstretched girl, at her shoulders, on the wall, outside the room – in a city, or in a territory? Has it happened, or is it indeed happening now?

Similarly, the Oxus river is a long, out-stretched body: the sounds and lives which pass through it – a fisherman, a shepherd, a little girl, a sleeping man, a tiger – resonate as ancient but also present, making the work as much an unusual document as a composition.

In her research into the depths of the history, languages and worlds of Central Asia, Saodat Ismailova composes works from which emerges, for enigmatic reasons, and notwithstanding what appears on the screen, never a solo figure, but rather a chorus. In fact, as she gives shape to an unusual portrait in interiors, and to a landscape which is only apparently peaceful, Saodat Ismailova seems to suggest that being observers means necessarily to be part of an organism and a body. Projection is not a mechanical act, but a form of knowledge. And every action cannot but be choral and shared, otherwise lethargy comes.

Andrea Lissoni