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 that explore Central Asia’s traditions, oral histories, landscapes, and complicated modern history through moving images, archival film, text, sound, and tactile visual textures.
Ismailova’s work moves from the Amu Darya River and ancient ruins to Soviet-era power stations, drawing on Central Asian family stories, ancient Iranian and Islamic philosophies, and ideas about memory and cyclical time. Nineteenth-century Uzbek ikats from the museum’s collections are displayed alongside her work, creating a meditation on place, cultural resilience, environmental change, and the way the past shapes life in an unstable present.
When: June 13–November 29, 2026
Venue: National Museum of Asian Art, East Building, Gallery 28
Collection Areas: Arts of the Islamic World and Contemporary Art
Artist: Saodat Ismailova
Tickets: Price not available
Exhibition Focus: The presentation considers the relationship between dream and reality, history and memory, and human beings and the environment. Ismailova combines her own footage with archival film, sound, and written text to reflect on how traditions persist, disappear, or transform over time.
Artist-Selected Objects: Ismailova selected objects from the museum’s historic collections of art from Central and Western Asia to accompany her work. Her selections include a fourteenth-century painting featuring a mysterious talking tree, a nineteenth-century kashkul or begging bowl, a painting of Solomon enthroned, an Iranian glass sprinkler, an architectural fragment, examples of Uzbek ikat textiles, and a painting of Iskandar speaking with the Waq Waq tree.
Object Interpretations: The selected works connect textile traditions with the female spinner and the Central Asian figure of Bibi Seshanbe; consider the disappearance of begging bowls, dervishes, and male dancers from contemporary public life; and use fragments and ruins as metaphors for incomplete memories. The Iranian sprinkler evokes rose water, gardens, shade, and paradise while also suggesting contemporary anxieties about water scarcity. Images of Solomon relate to Sulayman-Too, a sacred Central Asian site where animistic and Abrahamic traditions coexist, and to ecological ideas based on reverence and custodianship rather than possession.
Textile Works: The Uzbek ikats are discussed through their vivid historical colors and the word *abr*, meaning “cloud.” Their patterns are associated with reflections of clouds moving across water, suggesting a shifting or distorted perception of reality.
Central Asian Legends: The Iskandar and Waq Waq tree imagery connects with Ismailova’s research into the walnut forests of Arslanbob and legends that Alexander the Great’s wounded soldiers were healed by walnuts. The stories present trees as sources of both danger and healing and raise questions about wisdom, mortality, and the limits of earthly power.
Accessibility: Exhibition wall and case text is available online in a format that can be resized or accessed with a screen reader. Descriptive transcripts are also available.