Saodat Ismailova exhibition
Saodat Ismailova: *Melted into the Sun* is the first major solo museum presentation in the United States by film and installation artist Saodat Ismailova. The exhibition brings together recent works shaped by Central Asia’s traditions, oral histories, landscapes, and complex modern history, moving from the banks of the Amu Darya River and ancient ruins to Soviet-era power stations.
Ismailova combines moving images, sound, textures, text, archival footage, and her own recordings to create an atmosphere between dream and reality. Her work considers cyclical time, memory, environmental change, and the ways the past can help people understand their place in an unstable world. Nineteenth-century Uzbek ikats from the museum’s collection are shown alongside her works, emphasizing the endurance of cultural traditions.
When: June 13–November 29, 2026
Venue: National Museum of Asian Art
Location: East Building, Gallery 28
Collection Area: Arts of the Islamic World and Contemporary Art
Artist: Saodat Ismailova
Featured Works: The exhibition includes film and installation works that draw on Central Asian oral histories, family stories, ancient Iranian and Islamic philosophies, archival materials, and contemporary landscapes.
Film Content: The descriptive materials for *Melted into the Sun* depict melted metal or blackened, cracked material, arid hills, a river at sunrise, industrial activity, woods, ravines, rushing water, and mirrored installations. A veiled figure appears throughout imagery involving the sun, light, reflection, power, and transformation.
Historical Subject: One work considers al-Muqanna, an eighth-century leader in Central Asia known as the Veiled Prophet. The film addresses his Zoroastrian background, his ideas about the sun, and his association with alchemy, optical illusion, challenges to centralized power, social hierarchy, and land extraction. It also contrasts differing historical portrayals of him, from Arab accounts that regarded him as a charlatan to Soviet interpretations that presented him as a proto-socialist figure.
Artist-Selected Objects: Ismailova selected objects from the museum’s historic collection of art from Central and Western Asia. The selections include a fourteenth-century painting featuring a mysterious talking tree and a nineteenth-century begging bowl that has disappeared from public view. Her reflections connect these objects with the traditions, myths, histories, and ways of seeing that inform her visually and aurally atmospheric work.
Accessibility: Exhibition wall and case texts are available online in a format that can be resized or read aloud with a screen reader. Descriptive transcripts are also provided for the exhibition’s works, including *Melted into the Sun*.
Tickets: Price not available