I complete with time. Saodat Ismailova

The exhibition reflects on the nature of time and its perception through mystical traditions and the cultural heritage of Central Asia. Across moving image, sound, and installation, Ismailova weaves connections between women’s history, time perception, and the landscape.

The artist presents several stages of horsetail hair: as a raw material forming the screen surface in Time’s Tail (2025), in dialogue with horsehair-woven veils (artist’s collection), and as a political object of female emancipation in the film Her Right (2020). In resonance with 18,000 Worlds (2023), the use of horsetail hair also recalls the domestication of the horse in the Central Asian steppes — a moment that profoundly transformed human perception of time.

Through the use of horsehair, Ismailova evokes a relationship between history, local knowledge, and time. Horsehair functions both materially and emblematically — as a medium of projection and weaving, and as a metaphor for temporality, domestication, and women’s embodied histories.