booklet (PDF)

Along the fault lines of Central Asia, Saodat Ismailova’s films and installations interweave rituals, myths and dreams with the textures of everyday life. With When the Water Turns to Wind, she continues her longstanding exploration of the region’s complex history and culture, its political and social transformations after the fall of the Soviet Union and the ecological challenges of the present. Absence is a central motif: knowledge lost in historical ruptures, dried-up bodies of water and species gone extinct. For Ismailova, what has disappeared continues to shape cultural memory and the collective imaginary of Turkestan—the vast region that once stretched from the Caspian Sea to the Gobi Desert and united diverse cultures, languages and religions. 

In her newly developed installation When the Water Turns to Wind, Ismailova synthesizes her examinations of loss and memory into a narrative about the slowly vanishing Aral Sea. Once one of the largest inland lakes on Earth, the Aral Sea disintegrated into several separate bodies of water as a result of decades of desiccation—one of the most severe man-made environmental disasters of the 20th century. 

In her film installation developed specifically for Portikus, Ismailova’s camera follows the contours of the Aral Sea. She explores landscapes where life was once determined by water that are now dominated by sand, salt and harsh winds. Unlike a documentary survey, this artwork aims to make transformation and disappearance tangible as sensory experience, an expression of a profound ecological and cultural change. Together with composer and sound artist Marc Parazon, Ismailova has developed an accompanying soundscape that combines field recordings with original compositions.

Drawing from concrete local experiences, the work opens up a larger political and ecological framework. It addresses an extractivist water sector in the context of the local cotton industry, which is closely connected to Soviet and imperialistic Russian development projects. Uncovering historical traces and transnational interdependencies, Ismailova maps out the terrain in an imaginative visual exploration. In the process, she defies both imperial dividing lines and the national territorial borders of post-Soviet Central Asia, illuminating a region connected through shared history and experience.  

In double-landlocked Uzbekistan, rivers and lakes hold a special value. The Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, the Aral Sea’s tributaries, arise nearly two thousand kilometers away in the high mountain regions of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and are essential resources for Central Asia’s inhabitants. Due to ecological mismanagement and intensive irrigation, the rivers now reach the Aral Sea only as trickles. Where they once flowed into the lake, the Aralkum Desert has formed as a result. Fertilizers flushed into the lake over decades have permanently poisoned the landscape. Dust storms now absorb the substances deposited on the lakebed into the air.

Ismailova’s films resist the extractivist logic that shapes access to the landscapes of Central Asia by delving into ancestral knowledge, rituals and dreams, and suggesting alternative forms for ecological relationships. They can be read as reflections on the significance of depleted environments and marginalized cultural practices in times marked by political and social upheaval. In recalling forgotten stories and collective bonds that transcend national borders, she reveals universal concerns. Quietly but persistently, she insists on recalling both what has been lived and life that is yet to come.

 

An accompanying film program addresses global challenges related to resource scarcity and unequally distributed ecological burdens.

Thursdays at 7pm

26.02.26
Sharing a Dream with a River – additional films by Saodat Ismailova

12.03.26
Geographies of Absence – Between Disappearance and Re-Imagination

02.04.26
Memories of a Vanishing Sea, introduced by film researcher Kseniia Bespalova 

09.04.26
Whose Voice is This?, selected by DAVRA member Dilda Ramazan 

23.04.26
Echoes, Memory and the Unseen, selected by the Städelschule class of Saodat Ismailova

30.04.26
Undercurrents – On Landscapes and Legacies 

 

Saodat Ismailova (*1981 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan) graduated from the State Institute of Arts and Culture in Tashkent and Le Fresnoy – National Studio of Contemporary Arts in France. In 2021, she initiated the research collective DAVRA, dedicated to the exploration, documentation and dissemination of Central Asian culture and knowledge. Her most recent solo shows include the Swiss Institute, New York (2026); Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon (2025); Baltic Center for Contemporary Arts, Gateshead (2025); Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2024) and Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam (2023) among others. Her work was shown at both the 59th Venice Biennale and documenta fifteen in 2022. In 2025, she received the Han Nefkens Award for a new commission together with the Reina Sofía Museum (Madrid), Walker Art Center (USA) and the Singapore Museum of Arts and was named an Art Basel Golden Awardee. Her works are included in the collections of Tate Modern, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centre Pompidou, Paris; TBA21; FRAC Corsica; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; and Almaty Museum of Arts, Kazakhstan among others. She lives and works in Paris and Tashkent.

 

When the Water Turns to Wind is made possible by major support from Hessisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Forschung, Kunst und Kultur, and the Karin und Uwe Hollweg Stiftung, as well as the kind support of the Office of visual arts of the French Institute Germany and the French Ministry of Culture. The exhibition is also supported by Städelschule Portikus e.V.

Installation views: Wolfgang Günzel