WESTERN FRONT – Other Light

Western Front is pleased to present a solo exhibition by artist and filmmaker Saodat Ismailova. Bringing together the two films Melted into the Sun (2024) and To the Throat of the Sun (2026) in a site-specific installation, the exhibition explores light as a political and spiritual force through which history, memory, and myth are continually remade.

Rooted in the layered cultural inheritances of Central Asia, Ismailova’s films draw on oral traditions and cosmologies to trace forms of ancestral knowledge that persist despite successive political and environmental upheavals. Raised in post-Soviet Uzbekistan, her engagement with the region’s histories and cinematic traditions shapes a practice attuned to spiritual longing and fractured relationships to the land. Memory unfolds through ritual, landscape, and human, more-than-human, and mystical relations, where time is experienced across multiple temporalities.

Installed alongside a collection of kurpachas—traditional Central Asian quilted mattresses that accompany life from birth to death—the two films unfold around the enigmatic figure of Al-Muqannaʿ (The Veiled One), an eighth-century spiritual and political leader. After leading a revolutionary movement that sought a more just society, Al-Muqannaʿ gradually became a mythical figure. According to legend, he wore a veil to conceal a radiant light emanating from his face. For Ismailova, this becomes a point of departure for exploring the tensions between revelation and concealment, spiritual knowledge and political authority, and how visions of collective emancipation remain entangled with violence and sacrifice.

Bringing together ancient Iranian and Islamic philosophies, archival material, and newly filmed landscapes, Melted into the Sun is guided by light as myth, revelation, and cinematic material. Channeling memory through bodies, places, and systems of belief, the film reflects on the afterlives of revolution and the environmental impact of Soviet nuclear testing in Central Asia. To the Throat of the Sun extends these concerns through an abstract meditation on perception, transformation, and the thresholds between illumination and obscurity. Reintroducing figures, gestures, and landscapes from Melted into the Sun, the film shifts from historical reflection toward a more elemental experience of light—one that reconfigures the boundaries between vision, consciousness, and the world.

Melted Into the Sun is thirty-six minutes and To The Throat of the Sun is twenty-five minutes in duration. The films play one after the other, every hour on the hour.

Curated by Suzy Halajian, the exhibition builds on her ongoing collaboration with Ismailova, following her first Los Angeles exhibition at JOAN in 2024.

About the Artist

Saodat Ismailova is a filmmaker and artist based between Paris, France and Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Her work explores the relationships between memory, perception, mythology, and the moving image. Drawing on the intellectual and oral traditions of Central Asia, alongside dreams, rituals, and historical archives, she investigates how forms of knowledge survive erasure and political rupture, shaping individual and collective consciousness across generations. Working across film, installation, sculpture, and sound, Ismailova creates works in which documentary and myth, history and lived experience, the visible and the invisible converge, treating memory not as a record of the past but as a living force that continually reshapes reality. In 2021, she co-founded Davra, a collective dedicated to fostering artistic research and cultural exchange across Central Asia. In 2022, Ismailova participated in both the 59th Venice Biennale and documenta fifteen. She is the recipient of The Eye Art & Film Prize (2022), Foundation Pernod Ricard’s Nouveau Programme Award (2025), and the Art Basel Golden Award (2025).

About the Curator

Suzy Halajian is a curator and writer based in Los Angeles, where she serves as the Executive Director and Curator at JOAN. Her practice is invested in long-term collaborations with artists, and examines the intersections of art, politics, and social histories, with a particular focus on image-making, colonial histories, and contemporary surveillance. She has curated exhibitions and public programs at institutions including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, Kunstverein Amsterdam, UKS (Oslo), Galerie Hubert Winter (Vienna), and the Sursock Museum (Beirut). Halajian’s writing has appeared in BOMB, X-TRA, ArteEast, Ibraaz, and other publications. She holds an MA from Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies and is currently a PhD candidate in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Accessibility

Western Front’s gallery is a ground-floor, wheelchair-accessible space. A partially accessible all-gender bathroom is available.

What to expect: This exhibition is low-lit and includes video and amplified sound. Portable seating is available upon request at reception.

Alternative formats: The videos feature captions in English.

Further details about visiting and accessibility at Western Front can be found here.

Acknowledgements

Presented with support from the Audain Foundation.

Saodat Ismailova, Melted Into the Sun (2024), video still. Courtesy of the artist.

Saodat Ismailova, Melted Into the Sun (2024), video still. Courtesy of the artist.
Saodat Ismailova, Melted Into the Sun (2024), video still. Courtesy of the artist.

Saodat Ismailova, Melted Into the Sun (2024), video still. Courtesy of the artist.
Saodat Ismailova, To the Throat of the Sun (2026), video still. Courtesy of the artist.

Saodat Ismailova, To the Throat of the Sun (2026), video still. Courtesy of the artist.

Western Front is a non-profit artist-run centre in Vancouver.

We acknowledge the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations as traditional owners of the land upon which Western Front stands.