Saodat Ismailova, Other Time and DAVRA research collective

About

A continuous screening of moving image works, the film installation is organized in two consecutive programs. The first runs for four weeks and brings together three of Ismailova’s films: The Haunted (2017), Chillpiq (2018), and 18,000 Worlds (2023). The second program, running for the installation’s final ten days, speaks to Ismailova’s engagement with collective organizing. On the occasion of this exhibition, DAVRA invited Yuliya Sorokina, a curator from Kazakhstan, to organize DAVRA and Beyond: Videos of Central Asian Artists: a selection of films by young Central Asian artists working with moving image. March will include two parallel programs: At JOAN, Sorokina will speak about both the program and her thoughts on community building through the example of DAVRA. On the final day of the exhibition, Ismailova will speak with Los Angeles-based writer Perwana Nazif on Zoom about her practice.

Fluidly moving between history to spirituality to social issues, Ismailova engages with themes of national memory, women’s emancipation, and immortality, and uncovers buried cultures and beliefs. Central Asia’s tumultuous sociopolitical trajectory looms in the background, as successive regimes have led to the erosion of languages, traditions, and the natural environment. Ismailova acknowledges these losses, while her work puts forward the importance of deep connections—human, more-than-human, and mystical—as ways to resist extractivist logics. She invites us to reimagine other ways of being in the world and passing knowledge from one generation to the next.