àngels barcelona

18.000 Worlds, 2023

Single-channel HD video
32`

Acording to some mystics, the world we live in is just one of the 18,000 worlds that make up the universe. This concept appears regularly in religious poems that are part of daily life in Uzbekistan. Ismailova was familiar with the idea of the 18,000 worlds from her youth, and she encountered it again later in the work of the twelfthcentury Persian philosopher and mystic Shihab al-Din Yahya al-Suhrawardi. His texts, about such subjects as light and darkness, have been a source of inspiration to her ever since.

18,000 Worlds is the title of the exhibition and of the latest film by Ismailova. For this she dug into her own archives like an archaeologist, in search of unused fragments among what she has accumulated during years of filming. The images she chose belong to different places and periods, filmed for different projects: viewers will recognize the worlds she depicted in various earlier works.

In 18,000 Worlds, which also includes fragments taken from Eye’s collection, it becomes clear just how interwoven all of Ismailova’s works are. The artist sees this film as a talisman in the form of a video. She draws our attention to the fact that people all over the world are losing touch with their ancestors, and the danger of losing forms of knowledge is real.

Exhibition view, I Compete with Time, ángels barcelona, 2025