Your heart almost stops the moment you enter Saodat Ismailova’s As We Fade. Within a minute, you’ll forget about the outside world. The Baltic has curated a concise, brave first solo exhibition in the UK of film pieces by the Uzbek artist and film-maker. It is exhilarating, terrifying and unforgettable.
The room is dark. Four works are arranged around a padded black square in the centre for sitting or lying down on – a reference to the void, something Ismailova has been fascinated with throughout her two-decade practice. She grew up during perestroika, a period of widespread political, social and economic reform in the late 1980s, when Soviet ideology began to collapse leaving a void in the culture. Ismailova felt this deeply – her father was a cinematographer and she was on sets with him from a young age. The family lived in a building opposite the largest and oldest film studio in Uzbekistan. During perestroika, films stopped being screened in public.
