Main research theme: cultural identity, colonial heritage, the relationship between man and environment
A complex construction of temporal space sequences is the exhibition “A Seed Under Our Tongue” at Pirelli HangarBicocca, curated by Roberta Tenconi. It is the first anthology, in an Italian institution, of the Uzbek artist and filmmaker, Saodat Ismailova, a young witness of the post-Soviet era. Everything is on stage at the same time: video, sound effects, moving elements, sculpture, poetry for a large installation that calls for dynamic, multifocal and stratified vision.
Twelve artworks, six films and seven sculptures outline the artist’s research around the themes of her own cultural identity, colonial heritage and the relationship between humanity and the environment. Saodat Ismailova was born 43 years ago in Uzbekistan, in Tashkent; behind her back has already more than twenty years of experience and international exhibition awards: from the Turin Film Festival in 2004 to the Via Biennale di Venezia in 2013 and 2022, then to Documenta 15 in Kassel and the Berlin Festival in 2024. In 2021 she also founded the DAVRA research group dedicated to documenting and disseminating the culture of Central Asia to perpetuate any form of socio-cultural knowledge.
Born 43 years ago in Uzbekistan, she has won important international awards such as two Venice Biennales, Documenta 15 in Kassel, the Berlin Festival
An artist who, in other times, we could have defined militant for the ability to combine ethics and aesthetics, with a new responsibility of the gaze. At the heart of her poetics, the idea of the seed - which gives the name to the exhibition - as the origin of all things because, as she writes: “It contains memories, secrets and mysteries. It is essential, fragile and eternal: the foundation of the past and future. It regenerates and heals, it loses itself and then reveals itself.”
Eloquent words to understand her need to interweave various cultural plans in a continuous reading of the sense of the boundary and the dialogue between tradition and innovation. Behold, then, that date seed held under the tongue and passed from mouth to mouth will give life after many years to a visionary walnut forest, as legend has it. The seed as a symbol of preserving, passing on, but also of transmuting events, one within the other, to make history a mobile and welcoming system, a bridge towards new conscious cohabitations.
She founded in 2021 the DAVRA group dedicated to the documentation and dissemination of culture of Central Asia
The question between permanence, transience, memory starts from its ancient city, incredible crossroads of old and new, political changes and natural disasters and places where she traveled, especially from 2004 to 2010, to make numerous documentaries. She imbues her work with traditions and narrative testimonies - including those of her grandmother - on spiritual practices handed down within families: a cultural baggage that, with the French philosophy and the beloved Persian philosopher Sohrawardi studies, it becomes a poetic and far-sighted plunge even on our precarious sense of belonging.
