Saodat Ismailova: As We Fade

Three seductive, spellbinding films demonstrate the Uzbek artist and film-maker’s confidence in letting images tell the story, in her first solo exhibition at a UK institution

Saodat Ismailova, As We Fade, installation view, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead 8 November 2025 – 7 June 2026. © Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art 2025. Photo: Tom Carter.

Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead
8 November 2025 – 7 June 2026

by VERONICA SIMPSON

Although her star has been in the ascendant for some time, I didn’t feel the full power of the work of Saodat Ismailova (b1981, Tashkent, Uzbekistan) until late 2024, at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan. I was there to review the Jean Tinguely show, but her survey exhibition, A Seed Under Our Tongue, lured me in. It occupied the gallery between the public areas and the main Tinguely event, so you couldn’t avoid it. Every time I moved through that space I was captivated, enticed to spend more time exploring the immersive imagery, a love-letter to the landscape and shifting cultures and eras of Central Asia. A potent interplay of visuals with materials – ornate, brocaded floor cushions, embroideries, the presence of cotton, silk and horsehair – conjured an appealing space for sitting and surrendering to Ismailova’s aesthetic worlds.

I learned subsequently that she had a decade of feature film-making under her belt before moving into a more artistic film and sculptural practice. Taking a closer look at her work in the show now at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, you really see that experience in her films: a confidence in the power of images to tell the story, with the occasional, potent addition of words and text. I sensed an exhilaration in not having to be pinned down to a conventional narrative arc – or any narrative arc at all. Images, impressions and ideas weave together in what appears to be a free-associative flow, but is undoubtedly born of deep practice as well as instinct; an embodied knowledge of the themes and structures she wishes to explore, untethered from the more quotidian requirements of accessibility or legibility. The images are felt, rather than followed or consciously interpreted – understood in an instinctive interplay of the physical and sensory, subconscious and spiritual.

Saodat Ismailova, As We Fade, installation view, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead 8 November 2025 – 7 June 2026. © Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art 2025. Photo: Tom Carter.

There is a new film commission for this show, Swan Lake (2025). I admit I was hoping to see ballet dancers – especially when I learned that the film was inspired by a 24-hour period in August 1991, in the run-up to the USSR’s collapse, when a (failed) military coup triggered a panicking Soviet state TV channel to play the ballet on a continuous loop. But there is no sign of dancers on the screen. Instead, I see pale, tormented faces in black and white staring into the distance, their eyes filled with apprehension. Weaving across two screens, Swan Lake features a collage of clips from a huge array of films made in the period of the collapse of communism (roughly 1989 to 1992), all in black and white. I sink on to a handy bench to observe the 30-minute spectacle. There are a few repeating motifs: the face of an old man, in peasant dress, staring across a field of wheat, the light behind him. Another man – an intellectual, we assume (he is bald, bearded and wearing glasses and a clean, white suit) – wanders around an unfamiliar landscape, and is then shown lying on the ground. Is he dead? A distraught young woman steps barefoot around him. They are in an abandoned building filled with leaves. You can hear the leaves crunching. We see hands milking a goat, and then the camera shows the milk that’s squirting out of the goat’s teats spraying on to bare ground. A hypnotist on a TV screen is counting slowly. Mostly, the juxtaposed images on the two screens are not directly related, though they are adjacent and overlapping in all kinds of interesting ways. For example, at one point we see the naked upper half of a man sliding, on his back, into some kind of machinery (a medical scanning machine?) as giant hands on the screen to the right slide up and down a set of controls – perhaps graphic equalisers? Later, on the left screen, a crowd of people appear frozen on camera, eyes closed: we zoom up close into their faces. Is this a still? No, they are motionless while the world goes on about them, according to the right screen, which pans out to reveal the same crowd standing like statues, in what looks like a petrol station, while traffic flows past them on a multi-lane highway. There are many images portraying people asleep – curled up in bed, burrowing under duvets, a peasant woman in a headscarf asleep on a cushion. Are they in limbo? Or is this paralysis? Suddenly, a burst of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake is heard, only to be drowned out by a pulsing 1980s disco soundtrack as we segue to the interior of an 80s nightclub, and three characters, wearing horse’s heads as hoods, walk towards us. We see briefcases, helicopters, a gun being loaded. Then a young woman, wearing ear defenders as for a firing range, lifts her arm, holding the gun, and shoots. The face of a woman wearing a veil looms towards us. As the veil flickers in the wind, her eyes fill with tears. Then she opens her mouth and – in the only moment of colour in the whole sequence – flames flicker and burn as in a furnace. Twice these words appear: “We were led to believe that humiliation and lack of rights were to be accepted without opposition.”

Saodat Ismailova, Swan Lake, 2025. Installation view, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 8 November 2025 – 7 June 2026. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

Dancers performing Swan Lake do materialise at one point, on the right-hand screen: the corps de ballet, in white tutus, captured on a boxy TV, the image distorted. Meanwhile, on the left screen, a deranged-looking man holds a slice of broken glass up to his face and slowly runs his tongue along its edge. Even listing these images evokes the powerful sensations they generate. At the end, all the films Ismailova has spliced together, and their film-makers, are credited. They are from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Much later, I learn that her apprenticeship in the world of film has been lifelong: her father, Abdurakhim Ismailov, is a film-maker. Trained in Moscow, he became a director of photography in Uzbek cinema from the 1960s on, setting up an education centre for film-makers in the Central Asian region, where he still teaches. No wonder she has such deep knowledge of its back catalogue.

The adjacent wall text states that the film: “Seeks to capture the spirit of a period of immense transition in the region’s recent history – perestroika – a time that remains a neglected part of collective experience. It was an era of upheaval, struggle and survival: the collapse of an idea alongside an extreme pitch of hope, a time of losing ground, of liberation, grief, rage and joy.” The text concludes: “The film is dedicated to the children of perestroika, and to the forgotten films that captured the spirit of those turbulent times.”

Saodat Ismailova, As We Fade, installation view, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead 8 November 2025 – 7 June 2026. © Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art 2025. Photo: Tom Carter.

While I was old enough to have been keenly aware of Russia’s loosening grip on its territories, from the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, it is shocking now to realise how blinkered and skewed my (privileged) western European perspective was: entirely focused on what we saw as the “positives”, the ideals of democracy that we felt the former Soviet countries could now embrace. I never considered the impact on those who had fully bought (or had been bludgeoned) into the Soviet socialist project, and how ambivalent they might have felt at their “release”. Watching this film brings you close to the physical sensation of what it must have been like to have played a part in some vast, ambitious project – the creation and sustaining of the USSR in all its colonising force – and then see it come crashing down; the sense of overwhelm in contemplating the ruined landscape, social, economic and geographic, with which you are left. These impressions stayed with me for days, resonating profoundly and presciently with what we are living through now – the grand project of extractive capitalism and western-style democracy playing out in all manner of equally disquieting ways.

Saodat Ismailova, Melted Into the Sun, 2024. Installation view with ornate bean bags for reclining on, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 8 November 2025 – 7 June 2026. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

We take a step back into ancient mythology and a more linear narrative with the film at the far end of this long gallery, Melted into the Sun (2024). It relates the life and actions of al-Muqanna (The Veiled One), an eighth-century mystic from Khorasan. He fought against the Abbasid empire, espoused proto-socialist ideas and used magic and ritual in his practices. The film includes scenes shot in key places in his life: the banks of the Amu Darya River, the Zoroastrian fortress of Kafir Kala, a round burial ground called Chillpiq, and the city of Bukhara. But you don’t need to know any of this historical detail to enjoy the sumptuous imagery, the screen filled with golden autumn leaves and sun-burnished landscapes. Gold re-emerges often. A priest-like figure (presumably al-Muqanna) holds his hands up to the sky, his fingers appearing to have been dipped in gold. Bodies and clothing are backlit by the sun. Figures standing on what look like the ruins of an ancient temple flash mirrors at the sun. A promenade of people with white gauzy veils pinned to their faces by the breeze, stare up at the sun. A plane tears across the sky – its contrails streaking white lines across the blue. It all proceeds at an exquisitely slow pace. The film’s meditative rhythm generates a sense of calm and stillness, and complete receptivity to these seductive images. Long, ornate beanbags are laid out in front of the screen for extra comfort. They look a little like sleeping bags – or body bags.

Saodat Ismailova, As We Fade, 2024, projected onto 24 panels of silk gauze, installation view, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 8 November 2025 – 7 June 2026. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

As We Fade (2024), which was shown in Milan, lines the wall opposite Swan Lake, occupying its own shimmering, sculptural space. It is a film projected on to 24 panels of silk gauze, the light from the projector beaming on to the front panel and percolating through each one, refracting on to the floor from time to time. It is filmed on Mount Sulaiman-Too Mountain, a place of Muslim pilgrimage in Kyrgyzstan, and includes archival footage from 1929. The 24 panels are apparently a reference to the format of cinema – images unspooling at 24 frames a second – but it is hard to capture what is hidden between each frame, each panel. The images are elusive, mysterious, as you move around this filmic installation. Someone is climbing inside a cave and there are figures creeping across rocks. Presumably the mystery and impossibility of trying to grasp what is being shown is the point.

Saodat Ismailova, Zukhra, 2013. Installation view, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 8 November 2025 – 7 June 2026. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

At the front of the gallery – forming an introduction, in a way – is the earliest of the films, Zukhra (2013). As I enter, I see a woman lying on a bed, peacefully. It is not clear whether she is sleeping or even alive, whether it’s a film or a still. Slowly, if you pay attention, you can see her breathing. Eventually, ghostly images of a young man appear, fragments of text float across it. The projection screen is suspended in the room so that you can see it from both sides.

Katharine Welsh, a curator at the Baltic, says: “The bed work is the first work that became an ‘artwork’, capturing the imagination of the art world. I wanted to introduce it because it holds that idea of the void. It opens up ideas of dreaming, consciousness, the collective unconscious, and the idea of time. It is similar in scale to a history painting and your relationship is really confrontational, as it’s placed right in the doorway.”

I am struck by how well all these films work in this overlapping space, individually and collectively. Welsh agrees: “There’s a musicality to the work which is beyond the symbols. We intentionally chose films with an atmosphere that blends.”

Saodat Ismailova, As We Fade, installation view, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 8 November 2025 – 7 June 2026. © Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art 2025. Photo: Tom Carter.

Ismailova herself enjoys that ability to place audiences at the centre of an immersive event. Writing in Frieze Magazine in March, she said: “In an exhibition, audiences interact with my work totally differently because they can see my films more than once, from different perspectives, or step out at any moment.” She says she was able to show six of her films in a large open space in the show at Pirelli HangarBicocca. “This helped me think about the circulatory flow of the exhibition, especially when audio spilled over from one work into another. Yet, this bleed between works created a larger, unified narrative that encouraged a more elaborate form of reading my films in tandem with one another.”

Ismailova is clearly an artist enjoying the full expression of her powers. I urge you to head to Gateshead, and place yourself under her cinematic, aesthetic and choreographic spell.