Saodat Ismailova: Amanat—As We Sleep

Kunsthalle Bern is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in Switzerland of Uzbek artist and filmmaker Saodat Ismailova. Spanning both floors of the institution, Amanat—As We Sleep brings together seven large-scale video installations, centred around the newly commissioned film Amanat (2026). The exhibition marks the third and final chapter of a body of work that emerged from Ismailova’s sustained engagement with Arslanbob, an ancient walnut forest in Kyrgyzstan, following presentations at Swiss Institute in New York and LUMA Arles.

Derived from the Arabic amānah, meaning “trust” or something entrusted to one’s care, amanat describes a relation to inheritance that resists possession. What is entrusted to us is not necessarily ours to own, but something we are responsible for carrying, protecting and transmitting. In Ismailova’s work, this proposition becomes a way of thinking through landscapes, memories and forms of knowledge that have survived—and been transformed by—successive political regimes.

Her films move through the layered histories of Central Asia, where Soviet modernity radically reorganised social relations, cultural identities and relationships to nature, religion and tradition. Yet rather than treating the Soviet collapse as a historical rupture, Ismailova attends to its afterlives: to the ways ideology persists within collective memory, landscapes and inherited systems of belief. Her work asks how realities are produced, and how images, myths, political narratives and technologies of suggestion determine what societies come to recognise as true.

At the centre of the exhibition is sleep: not simply as a state of rest, but as a threshold between reality and fantasy, between myth and concrete forms of knowledge. Dreams, hypnosis, oral histories, mythology and hallucination unsettle the authority of rational and historical narratives, allowing other registers of experience to enter the field of representation. Traditional kurpacha mattresses from Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan are installed throughout the galleries, inviting visitors to lie down and encounter the works from a position that is deliberately less controlled. The exhibition thus shifts from the conventional demand to look towards a more porous mode of attention—one in which associations may emerge gradually, as fragments do in dreams.

Arslanbob appears as both physical landscape and psychic terrain: habitat, resource, spiritual site and contested territory. Its walnut forest carries ecological and mythological histories, while also bearing witness to political transformation. Since 2022, Ismailova has made several journeys to the region, where local communities have long depended on the forest and its harvest. Stories of its mystical and hallucinatory properties become, in her work, a point of departure for considering how landscapes accumulate competing systems of meaning.

This tension between environment and ideology also surfaces in earlier works presented in the exhibition, including Swan Lake (2025), where fragments of Central Asian cinema encounter Soviet television footage and hypnosis sessions from the late 1980s. Such juxtapositions complicate any stable distinction between archive and fiction, memory and propaganda, history and dream. They also acquire renewed urgency in the present, when ecological collapse confronts societies with the consequences of realities that have been denied, displaced or rendered politically inconvenient.

Through film, sound, sculpture and textile, Ismailova constructs an exhibition in which different temporalities and epistemologies coexist without being resolved into a single narrative. Amanat—As We Sleep asks what remains when political systems disappear, but their imaginaries endure—and what responsibilities accompany the memories, landscapes and forms of knowledge we inherit. To encounter these works is therefore not simply to look back, but to consider what we are entrusted with carrying forward.

Amanat is co-commissioned by Swiss Institute, New York, and LUMA Foundation, Arles.

Curated by iLiana Fokianaki, director Kunsthalle Bern
Assistant curator: Claudia Heim

With thanks to Stefanie Hessler, director Swiss Institute