Left to Be Desired Episode 2: Saodat Ismailova

In episode 2 of Left to be Desired, Paris and Tashkent based artist Saodat Ismailova talks to Maja & Reuben Fowkes about her work and the turbulent legacies of Soviet power for Central Asia. The conversation flows through the ecological disaster caused by the damming of the great rivers of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya and the social and environmental consequences of turning biodiverse agriculture into a cotton monoculture, to the motives of Soviet campaigns for the emancipation of women. Emerging from the discussion of films such as Two Horizons, Stain of Oxus and Her Five Lives is the layering of twentieth century Soviet and much more ancient histories and cultures in the life of the Eurasian Steppe.

                       

Saodat Ismailova grew up in post-Soviet Uzbekistan and is now based in Tashkent and Paris. Ismailova’s filmography addresses themes of national memory, women’s sovereignty, ritualism and mortality. Drawing from ancestral knowledge, folklore, animism and traditional spiritual practices of the region, her films have a mysterious, hypnotic quality, emphasising long takes reminiscent of the slow cinema aesthetic. In 2021 she founded Davra, a research group devoted to the study, documentation and dissemination of Central Asian culture. In 2022 her work was selected for both the Venice Biennale and Documenta. Three of her short films were recently screened in Tate Modern, London. 

                     

                     

Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts is the first large-scale interdisciplinary research project that institutes the Socialist Anthropocene as a new field of study within the critical corpus concerned with challenging and decentring the West-centric discourses of the Anthropocene, asserting the constitutive role of the twentieth century environmental histories of Socialism in the formation of the new geological age. The SAVA project was awarded in the ERC Consolidator Grant competition and is funded through a UKRI Frontier Research grant. It will run at the Postsocialist Art Centre UCL from 2022 to 2027. It is led by Maja and Reuben Fowkes. 

Maja and Reuben Fowkes are art historians, curators and co-directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) at Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London. Their publications include Art and Climate Change (Thames & Hudson, 2022), Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 (Thames & Hudson, 2020), Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar (Sternberg Press, 2021), The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism (CEU Press, 2015) and a special issue of Third Text entitled Actually Existing Artworlds of Socialism (2018). Recent curatorial projects include the exhibitions Colliding Epistemes at Bozar Brussels (2022) and Potential Agrarianism at Kunsthalle Bratislava (2021). Their Horizon Europe project on the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts is supported by a UKRI Frontier Research grant. For more, see: www.translocal.org