Saodat Ismailova

Pirelli HangarBicocca presents “A Seed Under Our Tongue,” the first Italian survey of Saodat Ismailova (Tashkent, Uzbekistan, 1981. Lives and works between Paris and Tashkent), one of the most acclaimed contemporary artists of the new generation, working at the intersection of cinema, sound and visual art. Her films and installations, with their striking iconography and hypnotic narratives, evoke the power of nature, the legacy of colonization, and the delicate relationship between humanity and the environment. Exploring collective memory, ancestral knowledge and the representation of femininity, they draw on the socio-political and cultural heritage of her native Central Asia to reflect on universal values.

With new works commissioned by Pirelli HangarBicocca, the exhibition marks the first institutional survey of Saodat Ismailova in Italy. It presents works from her two-decade career, including films, sculptures, and installations, in a specially designed spatial environment. Focusing on the concept and implications of transmission—whether of knowledge, stories, memories or landscapes—the exhibition conjures up different narratives, creating a complex and multi-layered atmosphere. Visitors are immersed in the cultural, social and political realities of Central Asia through an intricate layering of memories, landscapes, personal and collective images and time.

Saodat Ismailova is a filmmaker and artist from the first post-Soviet generation in Uzbekistan. Weaving memories, myths, rituals, and dreams into the tapestry of everyday life, her films explore her region’s historically rich and multi-layered culture, at the crossroads of different realities, migrations and colonial legacies. Drawing on her personal history, Ismailova delves into the collective dimension of memory and the global resistance to the impact of human activity on the environment. Her research spans ancestral knowledge and traditional practices, as well as more recent histories. For example, she incorporates archival film footage or textile elements from vernacular traditions that also allow for the continuity of artisanal activities that are in danger of disappearing. In doing so, Ismailova reframes the colonial past and the related issue of identity in the region by combining myths and animist practices with the dreams of the people who inhabit the lands.

“I think cinema is like a vessel that carries and remembers everything”, says Ismailova.

The title of the exhibition “A Seed Under Our Tongue” refers directly to the new works on view, including the newly edited film Arslanbob (2023-24) and the related sculptures, the golden seed of Amanat (2024) and the resin cast of a cave in The Mountain Our Bodies Emptied (2024). Drawing on an oral narrative—about a date seed hidden under the tongue and passed down through different epochs and people until it itself is transformed—the exhibition brings together twelve works, six films and seven sculptures that explore the question of transmission and the idea, in the artist’s words, “that we are responsible for the seven generations before us and the seven generations to come after us.”