Installlation Melted into the Sun, 2026
The installation of the Uzbek artist Saodat Ismailova turns around the Central Asia history of the Zoorotastrianism and the worship of the Sun that have been practiced there for many centuries. Her new installation references the game of mirrors, that 8th-century zoroastrian alchemist and an optic illusionist Al-Muqanna used to practice with hunderds of people building an arch from the cosmos to the commons. One of the world’s largest solar furnaces, located near Tashkent, also consists of millions of small mirrors arranged to capture and concentrate sunlight. Today, we count on Sun a more sustainable future. 

Ismailova’s new artwork – and the related artist film – engages with a solar imaginary shaped by myth, time, ideology, history, catastrophe, and ecology. The mirror becomes a complex symbol: it reflects the human desire for both relation and idealization, but also possession, and destruction. The Sun is generous, it “gives without receiving”, yet one day it too will cease to exist. Before that moment arrives, can humanity build a world of solarity – a fairer and more planetary society? 

Film Melted into the Sun, 2024
The film centers around a legendary figure of al-Muqanna, who lived in the 8th century in Central Asia as an alchemist, an illusionist, a preacher and a prophet. As a Zoroastrian, he worshipped the Sun and believed in solar politics capable of constructing a just society beyond human hierarchies. The fact that his face was always veiled, just like one can never look into the sun, creates a surface of projection. Arab historians portrayed him as a charlatan, while the Soviets framed him as a proponent of proto-socialism. 

The film moves across time and space linked to al-Muqanna’s legend, from the Amu Darya River, Chillpiq and Bukhara to the Zoroastrian fortress of Kafir-Kala. From the pre-historic period, through the Islamic era, the Soviet Uzbek engineering (and its spectacular solar furnace), up to the contemporary hyper capitalist times. Through a cyclical view of history, the film reimagines al-Muqanna as a figure traveling through time and shaped by myth, time, ideology, and political narratives related to the sun. And even if for us humans, the sun might seem timeless, it will explode one day. Will we be ever able, before that, to build a fair, planetary society? 

Duration: 35:50 min.
Commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Filmand co-produced by Batalha Centro de Cinema Porto for the exhibition Nebula 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Fondazione In BetweenArt Film.


Saodat Ismailova was born in Tashkent in 1981, and lives in Paris.