NMAA Online Talk: Saodat Ismailova and Marianne Kamp in Conversation4.10.2026 {en}
Join the Freer Research Center at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art on Zoom on Tuesday, October 6, 12–12:45 p.m. EDT for Sneak Peek: Saodat Ismailova and Marianne Kamp in Conversation. This program is free and open to the public. Register here.
Saodat Ismailova’s films weave together archival materials and her own footage to explore Central Asia’s layered histories and landscapes, from the region’s ancient past and Islamic traditions through the Soviet era and into the present. In this online program, Ismailova considers these subjects in conversation with Dr. Marianne Kamp, whose landmark studies of Uzbek social transformation have explored the lives of women and youth amid Soviet-era modernization and unveiling.
Together, their reflections invite us to consider how personal memory, oral history, and historical archives can illuminate the political, social, and environmental changes that have shaped Central Asia.
This program is part of the online lunchtime series Sneak Peek, where staff members and outside scholars share personal perspectives and new research related to the collections of the National Museum of Asian Art.
Born in Uzbekistan in 1981, Saodat Ismailova is an Uzbek filmmaker and artist living and working between Paris and Tashkent. She graduated from the Tashkent State Art Institute and Le Fresnoy—National Studio of Contemporary Arts in France. In 2021, she initiated Davra, a research collective dedicated to developing the Central Asian art scene. Ismailova participated in both the 59th Venice Biennale and documenta fifteen in 2022. The same year, she received The Eye Art & Film Prize (Amsterdam). In 2025, she received Foundation Pernod Ricard’s Nouveau Programme Award, was named an Art Basel Golden Awardee, and received the Han Nefkens Award for a new commission together with the Reina Sofía Museum (Madrid), Walker Center (USA), and the Singapore Museum of Arts. Her works are included in the collections of Tate Modern, London; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Centre Pompidou, Paris; TBA21; FRAC Corsica; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Almaty Museum of Arts, Kazakhstan; among others.
Marianne Kamp is an associate professor in the Central Eurasian Studies Department at Indiana University. She is a social historian of modern Central Asia who uses oral history methods to explore transformations in everyday life during the Soviet period and since the independence of the “-stans” in 1991. Dr. Kamp is author of Collectivization Generation: Oral Histories of a Social Revolution in Uzbekistan (Cornell 2024), The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling under Communism (University of Washington Press 2006); of an edited translation, with Mariana Markova, Muslim Women of the Russian Empire: Vladimir and Maria Nalivkins’ Nineteenth-Century Fergana Valley Ethnography (Indiana University Press, 2016); and of numerous articles and chapters.
Further information at https://asia.si.edu/whats-on/events/search/event:208404888/.
Source: NMAA Online Talk: Saodat Ismailova and Marianne Kamp in Conversation – Oct 6, H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online „CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.“
