Saodat Ismailova
Saodat Ismailova: As We Fade, 10.09.2025–22.11.2025
2025
Kunsthalle Lissabon is pleased to present "As We Fade," a solo exhibition by the renowned Uzbek filmmaker and visual artist Saodat Ismailova. This unique exhibition unfolds as a two-channel film installation. Visitors are invited to engage directly with the complex history of Sulaiman-Too Mountain's sacred rituals, political imposition, and cultural transformation. This narrative is both captivating and thought-provoking as it brings about questions on how state power, historical ruptures, and the passing of time alter sacred sites, raising questions about what is remembered or erased, and what resists oblivion.
In the film As We Fade, Ismailova traces the layered story of Sulaiman-Too Mountain, Central Asia’s oldest pilgrimage site, named after the local legend that the prophet Sulaiman rested there. Rising from the Fergana region in the city of Osh, Kyrgyzstan, the mountain has served as a focal point for spiritual life across centuries. Archeological evidence reveals that the mountain has been venerated for over a millennium, with traces of pre-Islamic worship still visible in petroglyphs and cave sanctuaries. In the Islamic period, mosques and pilgrimage routes were established, resulting in Osh being an important point along the Silk Road. During the Soviet era, efforts by the authorities to ban religious practices in Sulaiman-Too altered its sacred character. Converting the most revered cave, Rushon Onqur, into a modernist restaurant, along with a panoramic viewing deck at the summit. Afterwards, it was repurposed as a national historical and archeological museum. Despite these interventions, the mountain retained its spiritual significance, continuing to attract pilgrims and researchers alike, those drawn to the healing rituals, oral traditions, and cosmological beliefs embedded in its stone.
Without voice-over or didactic captions, Ismailova seamlessly weaves archival footage of rituals performed on the different parts of the mountain, dating back to as early as 1929, featuring early Soviet ethnographic field expedition scenes alongside contemporary observational shots of the museum interior and the surrounding landscape. The 19-minute film is projected onto twenty-four suspended silk panels, which are made in Margilan, one for each frame per second, so that images and landscape observations shift and fade as viewers walk through the space.
Alongside the film, the exhibition features "The Mountain Our Bodies Emptied," a reduced-scale resin cast based on LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) scans, a technology that uses laser light to create precise three-dimensional models of surfaces, of Tamchi Tomar Cave, the most active and venerated cave in the mountain. Together with the film, the sculpture extends Ismailova’s reflection on the significance ingrained in sacred sites, where physical and spiritual presence, collective memories, and cultural impositions leave their marks even as their meanings are contested.
Presented in Lisbon, a city shaped by its cycles of empire, trade, and urban renewal, As We Fade speaks to how places of worship, reunion, community, and heritage are adapted, overwritten, taken, or reclaimed over time. In this context, Ismailova’s work prompts us to consider: when a site’s original meaning is obscured, what evidence remains of its spiritual past, and how might active witnessing help recover traces of collective memory? What stays and what fades?
The exhibition is free and open to the public from Thursday through Saturday, 3:00 p.m.–7:00 p.m. Kunsthalle Lissabon is supported by the Portuguese Republic / DGArtes, the City of Lisbon, and the Vasco Collection.
About Saodat Ismailova
Saodat Ismailova (1981, Tashkent. Lives and works between Paris and Tashkent) is an Uzbek filmmaker and visual artist from the first post-Soviet generation in Central Asia. Weaving memories, myths, rituals, and dreams into the tapestry of everyday life, her films explore her region’s historically complex and layered culture, at the crossroads of different realities, migrations, and colonial legacies. Drawing on her personal history, Ismailova delves into the collective dimension of memory and the global resistance to the impact of human activity on the environment. Frequently based on oral stories in which women are the lead protagonists, and exploring systems of knowledge suppressed by globalized modernity, her works encapsulate this consciousness that hovers between visible and invisible worlds. Her research spans ancestral knowledge and landscape transformation in the region in more recent histories. She incorporates archival film footage and textile elements from vernacular traditions, which also allow for the continuity of artisanal activities that may soon disappear.
Graduated from the Tashkent State Art Institute and Le Fresnoy, National Studio for Contemporary Arts in France, she has established her artistic life between Paris and Tashkent. In 2021, she initiated the Davra research collective in Central Asia to develop the local art scene. In 2022, she received the Eye Art & Film Prize in Amsterdam. And, this year, she received the Art Basel Awards 2025 medal in the Emerging Artist category.
Ismailova has exhibited internationally with solo presentations including “Abyss Between Two Mountains,” Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico; “Melted into the sun,” Batalha Centro de Cinema, Porto (2025); “A seed under our tongue”, Hangar Biccoca, Milan, (2024); “Double Horizons”, Le Fresnoy, National Center for Contemporary Arts, Lille, France, (2023); “18 000 Worlds” at Eye Film Museum, Amsterdam, (2023). She has exhibited in numerous group exhibition including as part of Asia Pacific Triennale of Arts (2024), Shanghai Biennale of Arts (2024) curated by Anton Vidokle, Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale curated by Uta Meta Bauer (2024), Sharjah Biennial of Arts (2023) curated by Hoor al Qasimi; The Milk of Dreams curated by Cecilia Alemani, 59th Biennale Arte, Venice (2022); documenta fifteen curated by Ruangrupa, Kassel (2022); and many others. In 2024, she presented “Melted into the Sun” at the Nebula exhibition, commissioned by Fondazione in between Art and Film during the Venice Biennale of Arts. In 2025, Ismailova will also present solo exhibitions at the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art and STUK Art Center in Leuven.
Her works are in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, TBA21, FRAC Corsica, Tate Modern, the Almaty Museum of Arts, Kazakhstan, and others.
