Western Front is pleased to present a solo exhibition by artist and filmmaker Saodat Ismailova. Bringing together 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 histories of Central Asia, Ismailova’s films draw on oral traditions and cosmologies to trace ancestral knowledge that persists despite 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, ecological transformation, and fractured relationships to the land. Moving between past, present, and future, her works bring the forgotten, silenced, or erased into dialogue with the present, where memory is carried through ritual, landscape, and relations between the human, more-than-human, and mystical.

Installed alongside kurpachas—traditional Central Asian quilted mattresses that accompany life from birth to death—the films unfold around the enigmatic al-Muqannaʿ (The Veiled One), an eighth-century spiritual and political leader. After leading a revolutionary movement, al-Muqannaʿ became a mythical figure, and legend holds that he wore a veil to conceal a radiant light emanating from his face. Through his story, Ismailova explores 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 filmed landscapes, Melted Into the Sun is guided by light as myth, revelation, and cinematic material, reflecting on the afterlives of revolution and the environmental legacy of Soviet nuclear testing in Central Asia. Rather than presenting the past as fixed or linear, Ismailova approaches it as cyclical, continually rewritten as memory moves through bodies, places, and systems of belief. The film traces the entanglement of revolution, cosmology, and land, suggesting each shapes the others.