Amanat

Saodat Ismailova

In July 2026, LUMA Arles presents an exhibition dedicated to artist and filmmaker Saodat Ismailova, featuring a newly commissioned film developed in collaboration with Swiss Institute, New York and Kunsthalle Bern. This partnership reflects a shared commitment to supporting new artistic production and fostering international exchange.

Through her films and installations, Ismailova explores the cultural and spiritual histories of Central Asia, drawing on myth, oral tradition, and lived realities. Her works move between documentary and poetic forms, revealing how memory persists through landscapes, rituals, and collective experience.

The exhibition brings together the new commission, entitled Amanat, and earlier key works, offering insight into a practice that makes visible what often remains unspoken or overlooked. Her films approach time as layered rather than linear and identity as a process formed through continuity, displacement, and transmission.

At LUMA Arles, Ismailova’s work opens a space where image, sound, and memory converge. Viewers will encounter cinema as a living form capable of holding fragile histories and of giving presence to worlds that continue to exist beyond the limits of visibility.