selected works
Film by Saodat Ismailova
Feedback, glass armonica, and other prepared analog instruments fuse the world of Saodat Ismailova's 'The Haunted' and underline its meditation on history, loss, and transformation.
Saodats Ismailova's symbolic and suggestive film is a cinematic letter to an extinct race of tigers, and uses an almost hallucinatory force to conjure up a mythological, Central Asian world of yesterday. A majestic animal that speaks to us about the historical changes that led up to its own extinction as a result of modern industrialisation and fur hunting, but which lives on in the collective imagination of Turkestan as a sacred image of the soul. Ismailova's elegiac but vitalistic work lets us sense historical and cultural changes through a hypnotic smokescreen of visions. The patinated archive footage of urban life in the region at the beginning of the 20th century, which emerges before us between pictures of today's vast landscapes, is haunting in its modest intensity. 'The Haunted' is a work that consists of admonishing appearances, but is also an aural experience of a different (and more spiritual) world.
VIDEO FILES
Feedback, glass armonica, and other prepared analog instruments fuse the world of Saodat Ismailova's 'The Haunted' and underline its meditation on history, loss, and transformation.
Saodats Ismailova's symbolic and suggestive film is a cinematic letter to an extinct race of tigers, and uses an almost hallucinatory force to conjure up a mythological, Central Asian world of yesterday. A majestic animal that speaks to us about the historical changes that led up to its own extinction as a result of modern industrialisation and fur hunting, but which lives on in the collective imagination of Turkestan as a sacred image of the soul. Ismailova's elegiac but vitalistic work lets us sense historical and cultural changes through a hypnotic smokescreen of visions. The patinated archive footage of urban life in the region at the beginning of the 20th century, which emerges before us between pictures of today's vast landscapes, is haunting in its modest intensity. 'The Haunted' is a work that consists of admonishing appearances, but is also an aural experience of a different (and more spiritual) world.
