Zukhra

23 June – 2 July

2013, 32 min, HD video

Conceived as a looped installation for the Central Asian Pavilion at the 55^th Venice Biennale, 2013.

ZUKHRA

In Uzbek, the planet Venus or the morning star that appears fleetingly in the twilight; also ‘bright, beautiful, shining’.

For women in Uzbekistan Zukhra represents love, wish, and desire.  Legend has it that a young girl, Zukhra, mysteriously disappeared and reappeared in the sky as a star. Since then, when an Uzbeki woman is seeking for a wish to be granted she confronts the morning star, Zukhra, in solitude at dawn.

SYNOPSIS

In Zukhra we see a young woman sleeping; a deathbed scene in a central Asian house with mud walls and a bed made of 40 korpas*, illuminated by the shimmering light of a stuttering electrical flow. The woman has entered a lethargic dream, her soul stolen by spirits. The only way to call it back is through a jahr – a Central Asian exorcism ritual that dictates the fate of the soul; memories of the past inhabit the mind of sleeping Zukhra – a ‘Sleeping Beauty”, an “Ophelia of Central Asia” that awakes to her own death, the winter of her soul.

We hear the sound of her heart beating, her dreams, even her memories. The sounds change like the whispering of the angel sitting on the right shoulder** and the trembling sounds of the angel on the left.  We can come to know her by the sounds of her past.  The room is filled by those sounds, sounds that appear as re­collections of the history of Uzbek women, of Central Asian women, of a woman that lived in the verge of the soviet as an independent spirit.  We are suspended in a time of our own without a destiny, without history, in a lethargic dream, in a state of floatation, between good and evil, married to our own death, in the winter of our soul.

*In Uzbek tradition a woman recently married sleeps atop 40 korpas (traditional matrasses) and everyday of her chilla or vow, one korpa is removed.

**Kiraman Katebinin: the Islamic tradition of honou­rable scribes, are the angels sitting on our shoulders, the right angel is the one who records our good deeds and the left one the bad.

DIRECTORS NOTES

Zukhra was shot in the deathbed of my grandmother, in my family house in the old city of Tashkent in 2013.

Every lived moment, sound and word heard, memory forgotten, leaves an indelible mark on us that goes deep under our skin forever. In maturity we become a being that reflects each moment lived and witnessed. In my interpreta­tion of the well-known Central Asian legend Zukhra, which centres on a female character that recalls Shakespeare’s Ophelia, I would like to talk about death as a way to exorcise my memories as a woman born and grown up in Central Asia in the crossover times between the fall of the Soviet Union and the awakening of a new unknown identity. While thinking on the concept of winter I dreamed of women hibernation, of sleeping beauty, of freezeing the exact moment where we become women – a suspended instant – and the concept of the winter of the soul.

I was brought up by my grandmother that for me was and still is the carrier of womanhood, a woman that no longer exists, a woman that for me lives suspended in my memories of her, of her voice telling me things, whispering me orders, laws, superstitions beliefs that somehow have been transmitted from her to me through whispers, whispers that form the shape of my spirit and soul.

Zukhra somehow wants to bring alive that image of the woman, that suspended ghost of Central Asian woman that we have lost and that somehow lives in all of us, as we live suspended in this lethargic dream, in this non reality.

In Zukhra there are some recurrent themes: dreams, death, exorcism, lethargy, womanhood, feminine awakening and annihila­tion, deathbed, the last breath, rebirth, apathy.

Dreams are a very important fabric of the Central Asian soul, they are a bridge to the past and to the future, and they contain a key to understanding who we are and where we are going, that is why I work on the idea of reproducing dreams, using sound, recreating those whispers that are the memory of my grandmother and possibly of all women.

THE LEGEND

Every night Zukhra secretly left her house.  Her family began to suspect the girl was in love, so the girl’s brother decided to follow her to see who her lover was.  He took a knife ready to punish his sister.  Zukhra walked out of the village, through fields and gardens, towards the mountain.  At the entrance to a cave, she turned and looked at her brother, who, having seen his sister hesitate and begin to turn around, was hiding behind a tree.  Zukhra entered the cave and never came out.  Her brother looked everywhere for her, but Zukhra had disappeared.

With her last breath she whispered: “I am the last light that makes it ‘til the morning”, then became a star.  Since then she shines every night side by side with the moon, lighting the way for all girls.

BIO

Born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan in 1981. Saodat studied filmmaking at the Tahskent State Institute of Arts before working at the Fabrica research centre in Treviso, Italy, where she direc­ted several projects, including Aral, Fishing In An Invisible Sea (2004) and a series of video installations.  In 2014, Saodat’s first feature-length film – Chilla, 40 Days Of Silence – premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.  Her first solo exhibition – Celestial Circles – opens in September 2014 at Kuntsammlungen, Augsburg, Germany.

FILMOGRAPHY

2002 – Zulfiya (15 min.)
2004 – Aral, Fishing in an Invisible Sea (52 min.)
2008 – Avalanche (70 min.)
2009 – In the Shrine of Heart (24 min.)
2013 – Navruz (20 min.)
2014 – Chilla, 40 Days of Silence (84 min.)

CREDITS

Saodat Ismailova – director, editor and sound
Carlos Casas – photography
Dildora Pirmapasova – Zukhra

Download a PDF relating to Zukhra here

All This Can Happen

9 – 15 June

2012, 50 mins, HD, 16:9, colour, sound

SYNOPSIS

“I have to report that one fine morning, as the desire to take a walk came over me, I put my hat on my head, left my writing room or room of phantoms and ran down the stairs to hurry out into the street…”

All This Can Happen is constructed from archive photographs and footage from the earliest days of cinema.  Based on Robert Walser’s novella ‘The Walk’ (1917), the film follows the footsteps of the protagonist as a series of small adventures and chance encounters take the walker from idiosyncratic observations of ordinary events towards a deeper pondering on the comedy, heartbreak and ceaseless variety of life.  Juxtapositions, different speeds and split frame techniques convey the walker’s state of mind as he encounters a world of hilarity, despair and ceaseless variety.

One important inspiration is the nineteenth-century scientist Étienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904), whose work represents one of the earliest attempts to record movement photographically.  “Each individual frame in a Marey sequence has its own character” says Siobhan Davies. “This led us to much experimentation with the tension between the stillness of a single frame and the movement in a sequence of frames. The constant interplay between stillness and movement is a distinctive aspect of the style of our film.”

“What interests us most of all is counterpoint: creating different rhythms and meanings through the juxtaposition of one thread of sound or imagery against another. We want to show how observation and fantasy, memory and speculation can all co-exist in the same mind at the same time, so that we create a ‘psychological 3D’ or ‘cubist’ portrait of a mind.” David Hinton.

Public Houses – “Later I arrived at all sorts of public houses, which produce consequences which everyone knows. Even the most virtuous person cannot dispute the fact that he is never master of certain improprieties. Luckily, however, one is of course, human, and as such easily pardonable.”

An Inexpressible Feeling for the World – “I stood and listened, and suddenly there came upon me an inexpressible feeling for the world, and, together with it, a feeling of gratitude, which broke powerfully out of my soul.”

Every Smallest Living Thing – “With the utmost love and attention the man who walks must study and observe every smallest living thing.  The highest and the lowest, the most serious and the most hilarious things are to the walker equally beloved, beautiful and valuable.”

All This Can Happen – “Do you think it quite impossible that on a gentle walk I should meet giants, do business with booksellers, dine at noon with intelligent ladies, stroll through woods, dispatch dangerous letters, and come to wild blows with spiteful, ironic master tailors? All this can happen, and I believe it actually did happen.”

All Things Must Pass – “So then everything, everything, all this rich life, the friendly thoughtful colours, this delight, this joy and pleasure in life, all these human meanings, family, friend and beloved, this bright, tender air full of divinely beautiful images, houses of fathers, houses of mothers, and dear gentle roads, must one day pass away and die, the high sun, the moon, and the hearts and eyes of men.”

DIRECTORS’ BIOGRAPHIES

Siobhan Davies

A British choreographer, founder and artistic director of Siobhan Davies Dance.  Siobhan has created over 40 works to critical acclaim (having twice twice an Olivier Award, and amongst others, Digital Dance Awards and a South Bank Show Award). She began dancing while a student at Art College and soon joined London Contemporary Dance Theatre, founding in 1982 the influential company Second Stride with Richard Alston and Ian Spink. Her curiosity has led her to extend her work through relationships with film, visual arts and crafts. She has commissioned films by dance and visual artists including Idris Khan and Sarah Warsop, Marcus Coates and Henry Montes and Lucy Skaer and Gill Clarke. Siobhan Davies Dance was formed in 1988 and in 2006 moved to the RIBA award-winning Siobhan Davies Studios.

David Hinton

A British film director who has twice won BAFTA awards for his documentaries. His dance films have also won many awards, including a Prix Italia, an Emmy and the IMZ Dance Screen Award. He worked for ten years on the ITV arts programme The South Bank Show, where he made documentaries about artists of all kinds, including painter Francis Bacon, film-maker Bernardo Bertolucci, writer Alan Bennett, and rock and roller Little Richard. He has also made films about Dostoyevsky, visual comedy, and the Cultural Revolution in China. He is well known in the dance world for Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men and Strange Fish, his film versions of stage shows by DV8 Physical Theatre. He has also directed television films with Adventures in Motion Pictures, the Alvin Ailey Company and the Royal Swedish Ballet, and he has collaborated with several choreographers to create original dance works for the screen. He teaches dance film workshops all over the world.

THANKS

Robyn Cabaret, Siobhan Davies Dance.

The production of the film was supported by Arts Council England and the Siobhan Davies Commissioning Fund, in partnership with the British Film Institute.