Through "Her Right" (2020), "Her Five Lives" (2020), and "Swan Lake" (2025), artist Saodat Ismailova reflects on Soviet Central Asian cinema as a material that continues to shift after the political world that produced it has disappeared.
The three works are constructed around moments of rupture and transition: the transformation of women’s lives through the Soviet campaign for emancipation; the shifting representation of women in Soviet Uzbek cinema against changing political identities; and the feverish period of perestroika that preceded the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Rather than treating the archive as evidence, the works explore how images can be detached from their original narratives and made to generate new narratives, reflections, speculations, meanings, tensions, and histories in the present.
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