Saodat Ismailova: Amanat

In the walnut forest of Arslanbob, in Kyrgyzstan, a young boy falls asleep, dreams, and wakes to a teeming woodland. He wanders, pauses for vistas, and, like a squirrel hopping from branch to branch, he shakes walnuts from the treetops. He’s in the largest walnut grove on earth.

Amanat (2026), a 36-minute film by Saodat Ismailova, asks you to stay with this. Give in. Let the not-knowing and absence of narrative be the point.

Then move on to the sound installation by Mélia Roger. On your way, look for a small relic on the wall: a walnut and date pit cast in gold, pinned like poetic remembrances. Settle onto the kurpacha — traditional red velvet mattresses — where recordings from the Arslanbob forest reverberate, screeching with life. A reminder that silence is rarely nature’s default.

Upstairs, the mood shifts. In Swan Lake (2025), Ismailova revisits cultural memories of the Soviet occupation of Central Asia, when state television famously broadcast the ballet Swan Lake on repeat during moments of political crisis. She weaves archival footage of Anatoly Kashpirovsky, the television healer who led mass hypnosis sessions in the regime’s waning years. The result feels like a collective fever dream: ballet, propaganda, psychic spectacle.

Amanat is the Arabic word for care, a moral responsibility given by God. Something to be “held in trust.” In Ismailova’s hands, that idea extends from the strange theater of the late Soviet Union to the living rhythms of the forest.

Saodat Ismailova (b. Tashkent, Uzbekistan, 1981) lives between Paris and Tashkent. A filmmaker and visual artist working across myth, ritual, and memory, she has studied at the Sundance Film Institute, Le Fresnoy in France, and Fabbrica in Treviso, Italy. She has exhibited at Documenta and the Venice and Shanghai Biennales. After New York, the show travels to LUMA Arles, France, and Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland.