Public Programs @ The Institute
Series: Artists at the Institute
Amanat: Ecologies of Trust
Tuesday, April 14, 2026, 6:00pm
Saodat Ismailova
Saodat Ismailova’s solo exhibition at the Swiss Institute (January 21–April 12, 2026) centers on Amanat (2026), a film concluding her long-term engagement with the ecologically vulnerable Arslanbob walnut forest in Kyrgyzstan. Amanat—which narrates the forest's mythic origin tale about a young boy entrusted with the sacred responsibility of cultivating the forest—shares with many of Ismailova's earlier films a preoccupation with vernacular Central Asian knowledge production, the multilinear temporalities constituted by this knowledge, and its practices of caring for and relating to land. In her examinations of ecological phenomena and their consequences for human culture, Ismailova dwells on the legacies of Russian imperial, Soviet, and capitalist environmental interventions and campaigns of technological modernization in the region. In this talk, the artist will discuss the mutual constitution of the natural environment and its human mediators in her latest works.
Saodat Ismailova is an Uzbek filmmaker and artist whose work interweaves rituals, myths, and dreams to explore the layered cultures of Central Asia. Rooted in oral histories, her films revive forms of knowledge suppressed by globalized modernity and move between visible and invisible worlds. Through a palimpsestic approach, she draws on repressed ancestral memory to reveal the cultural complexity of her region in the aftermath of Soviet domination.
She graduated from the Tashkent State Art Institute and Le Fresnoy — National Studio of Contemporary Arts in France — and has since established an artistic life between Paris and Tashkent. In 2021, she initiated Davra, a research collective dedicated to developing the Central Asian art scene. In 2022, Ismailova participated in both the 59th Venice Biennale and documenta fifteen. She received The Eye Art & Film Prize (Amsterdam, 2022), Foundation Pernod Ricard’s Nouveau Programme Award (2025), and was distinguished as an Art Basel Golden Award Medalist in 2025.
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