Saodat Ismailova: Melted Into the Sun
Saodat Ismailova: *Melted into the Sun* is the first major solo museum presentation in the United States devoted to the film and installation artist Saodat Ismailova. The exhibition brings together recent moving-image works, sound, archival material, and objects from the National Museum of Asian Art to explore Central Asian traditions, oral histories, landscapes, and the region’s layered modern history.
Ismailova’s imagery travels from the Amu Darya River and ancient ruins to Soviet-era power stations and other landscapes shaped by human intervention. Drawing on Iranian and Islamic philosophies, family histories, myth, memory, and ideas about the cyclical nature of time, she creates an atmosphere that moves between dream and reality. Nineteenth-century Uzbek ikats from the museum’s collection appear alongside her works, evoking place, cultural resilience, and the persistence of older ways of seeing. The exhibition also considers how the past and memory can help people understand their position in an unstable world and the effects of human activity on the environment.
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
Featured Work: The exhibition includes Ismailova’s 2024 single-channel video *Melted into the Sun*, with sound and a running time of 35 minutes. It was commissioned by Fondazione In Between Art Film and Batalha Centro de Cinema Porto.
Artwork and Themes: The film and related installations combine original footage, archival film, text, sound, and tactile visual textures. Its imagery includes blackened, melted material; dry hills and dust; sunrise over a river; a veiled figure moving through woods and across rocky landscapes; mirrors reflecting sunlight; flowing water; industrial structures; and hillsides covered with dark stone or slag. The work invokes al-Muqanna, the eighth-century “veiled prophet,” whose story connects religious and philosophical traditions with challenges to centralized authority, hierarchy, and the extraction of land and resources. Through these images and references, the exhibition reflects on power, environmental change, belief, repetition, and the ways history survives through collective memory.
Artist-Selected Objects: Ismailova selected additional works from the museum’s historic collections of art from Central and Western Asia. These include a fourteenth-century painting featuring a mysterious talking tree and a nineteenth-century begging bowl that has disappeared from public view. The objects, archives, and oral histories reflect the research underlying her practice and bring history, myth, and memory into conversation with the exhibition’s films and installations.
Accessibility: Exhibition wall and case text is available in an accessible online format that can be resized or heard with a screen reader. Descriptive transcripts are also available for the exhibition’s video works, including a timed account of the imagery, onscreen text, and subtitles in *Melted into the Sun*.
Tickets: Price not available