Uzbekistan artist Saodat Ismailova’s short film Melted into the Sun (2024, 35 minutes) features a veiled figure with silver fingertips navigating a desert landscape with a group of devout followers. The voice of this mystical figure Al-Muqanna, also known as The Veiled Prophet, whispers in Uzebek, speaking to the followers and viewers. Al-Muqanna was an eighth-century mystic and revolutionary from Khorasan who challenged the central and hierarchical power of his time, as well as resource extraction and its effect on the environment. Seen as a charlatan by some, and significant by others, during the Soviet era he was interpreted to be a proto-socialist. Ismailova discovered him in Soviet history books of Uzbekistan: “Back then, every discipline was manipulated and shaped according to the narrative of the center—which, for us, back then was Moscow. He was presented as a kind of proto-socialist, as if socialism had originated in bigger Central Asia.”
Ismailova was born at the end of this Soviet era in Central Asia. She remembers how the shift from one societal structure to a less-defined and indeterminate one was disorienting and fragile. As the film unfolds, a colossal sculpture of Vladamir Lenin appears, built into the Kirov Dam, and the solar furnace of Uzbekistan, which was an early solar technology, also features as a symbol of sun worship. The film travels along the banks of Amu Darya river, to the round burial ground of Chillpiq, and the city of Bukhara, all significant sites for having been touched by the prophet. The shifts in landscape parallel this sense of disorientation in societal and temporal changes specific to this region. The figure of Al-Muqanna was resurrected in the post-Soviet era as people sought alternative spiritual guides in a time of ideological collapse. Ismailova says of Al-Muqanna: “I think this film was a very complex one for me. I was working with a character who left behind an uncertain and contradictory legacy—there is nothing concrete written about him. His story exists like an echo upon an echo, reverberating through time…he was a dyer, an alchemist, an optical illusionist, a preacher, a prophet, and interpreted sometimes as the first revolutionary figure. The moment I realized the direction I wanted to take was when I asked myself how I could connect his story to recent times—to the context I was born and raised in.”
The Uzbek poet Jontemir Jondor was invited by Ismailova to perform the character of Al-Muqanna in the film, preaching and journeying with his followers. The film features his followers holding mirrors to both manipulate and reflect light. The symbolism of light as a means to see and the veiled faces of the followers whose sight is obfuscated, also extends to the viewer whose own sight is disrupted by the glinting sunlight from the polished surfaces. The idea of seeing and unseeing extends the notion of a present and future that is known and unknown, constantly shifting.
Ismailova is both an artist and a researcher. Wanting to explore the history and collective memories of her region in a post-Soviet world, she brought together other artists and researchers in 2021 to form DAVRA, as a way to reimagine Central Asian cultural heritage by working with “lost” knowledge and archives. Working at the crossroads between Europe and Central Asia, Ismailova’s art navigates the terrain of this region’s anxiety amid the societal and ideological collapse of the Soviet era, the political upheaval that ensued and how then to survive in this new landscape, with the possibility of hope and liberation.