The first solo UK exhibition by Saodat Ismailova, a filmmaker and artist based between Tashkent and Paris, has just wrapped up at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Newcastle. Featuring four video works, Zukhra (2013), Melted into the Sun (2024), As We Fade (2024), and Swan Lake (2025), the exhibition traces the exploration of legacies of socialism across Central Asia that has defined Saodat Ismailova’s artistic career (Fig. 1).
Having visited this exhibition as part of the “Transitions” project, I spent hours immersed in Ismailova’s search for eternal worlds, forever changed by the arrival of socialist projects into the region in the twentieth century. As Ismailova states in Melted into the Sun (2024), a video in which she explores indigenous and socialist ways of connecting to the energy of the cosmos, “the eternal has become the temporary, and the temporary has become our heritage.” As these words appear on the screen, the eternal is portrayed as a mosque dome hidden behind the mountainous parts of the steppe landscape. The temporary, in turn, is depicted by the massive Lenin head that marks the entry to the man-altered part of the Talas River valley in northern Kyrgyzstan—the dam of the Kirov reservoir (Fig. 2).
The transition from socialist coloniality to independence does not, however, bring a return to indigenous world-making. As Ismailova’s panoramic shots of Central Asian cities in Melted into the Sun (2024) and other videos demonstrate, the natural areas from which one could draw energy by spiritually connecting to them have now been “melted” into socialist landscapes of urban and technological development. The transition did not just come and go; rather, it perseveres in the DNA of the region—both in the its terrain, and in its cultural heritage.
The latter point is particularly evident in Ismailova’s latest work, the two-channel video installation Swan Lake (2025), which celebrated its premiere in this Baltic Centre exhibition. In this video work, experts from the 1980s–2000s films by Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Turkmen, and Uzbek directors mix with scenes from the Swan Lake ballet, which appear only as glitches on the screen (Fig. 3).
This 1876 ballet, composed by Tchaikovsky, came to symbolize perestroika across the post-Soviet space, when state channels played it non-stop as the only programming option during the August Coup of 1991. Placed alongside such key works as Needle (dir. Rashid Nugmanov, 1988, KZ), Mankurt (dir. Khojaykuli Narliyev, 1990, TM), or I Remember You (dir. Ali Khamraev, 1995, UZ), it echoes the message Ismailova voices in Melted into the Sun (2024)—it is impossible to parse the imposed socialist themes from the indigenous imaginaries when looking at the transition era. Both are “melted” together and constitute the heritage of the transition era far beyond the borders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
