As part of the SAVA Creative Fellowship (2024–25), Uzbek filmmaker and artist Saodat Ismailova explored the historically complex, layered cultures of Central Asia, a region shaped by intersecting material histories and migratory legacies. During the SAVA fellowship, her research, spanning ancestral narratives to modern political developments, gave rise to several moving image pieces. Together, these works, As We Fade (2024), Melted Into the Sun (2024), Swan Lake (2025), and Arslanbob: The Healing Forest (2022-ongoing), form a dialogue through which Saodat navigates collective memory, cultural voids, and the formation of post-Soviet identities in Central Asia. Below, we take a closer look at two of these works – Swan Lake (2025) and Arslanbob: The Healing Forest (2022-ongoing) – both of which Saodat has been developing over the last few months of her fellowship.

Swan Lake (2025), a captivating montage drawn from archival footage sourced from forty-four films produced between 1988 and 2001 in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, evokes the atmosphere of the Eastern Bloc’s collapse and the transition into the post-Soviet period. Weaving together ideas of psychic space, power, and propaganda, the work traces how collective imaginaries fracture and reform in moments of ideological rupture. Filtered through a personal and affective lens, Swan Lake mirrors the region’s anxieties amid political upheaval and the tensions between survival, hope, and liberation. Revisiting and repurposing Central Asian films in this way allowed Saodat to reflect on the region’s complex historical legacies as well as its possible futures, while resisting reductive narratives of either victimisation or heroic resistance.

Arslanbob: The Healing Forest (2022-ongoing) offers another immersive encounter, this time within the ancient walnut forest of Arslanbob, located in southern Kyrgyzstan, believed to be the oldest and largest of its kind in the world. Inspired by the forest’s intoxicating effects on both animals and humans, attributed to the hallucinatory properties of carbon dioxide released by walnuts, Saodat maps this sacred landscape by exploring its environment, rich stories, and legends. Through layered recordings of sound, image, and gesture, the film traces interconnections between humans, trees, plants, and spirits, foregrounding the forest as a living space. Upon invitation from Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, Saodat developed a performative project to accompany the piece, linking the Arslanbob forest with a local forest where the festival took place, instigating a dialogue between geographically distant ecologies.

Saodat Ismailova, Arslanbob: The Healing Forest, performance for Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2025.

All four films are now on display at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, as part of Saodat’s first solo exhibition in a UK institution. Saodat Ismailova: As We Fade is on show until 7 June 2026.