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Until June 4th: Saodat Ismailova | Eye Filmmuseum

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Klara Emilia
·
Jun 2

It's the last few days to go visit this marvelous exhibition at Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam that is there until June 4th. The visual artist Saodat Ismailova takes us with her to her native Uzbekistan and explores questions of traditions, myths, dreams, and collective memory in Central Asia.

One aspect that Ismailova explored and that I found especially fascinating was the question of language and accessibility. The Uzbek language changed alphabets throughout its modern history. It was written in an Arabic script up until the late 1920s, when it was changed to a Latin script. In the 1940s the Cyrillic script became the official one as part of a language reform in the Soviet Union. Today, Uzbek is mostly written in the Latin script again. However, the switch from Cyrillic to Latin is not yet fully finalised, as Uzbekistan announced that the country aims for a full transition to the Latin-based alphabet in 2023.

According to Ismailova, these alphabet changes made it very difficult to access sources from previous generations and to create a written cultural canon. This made myths, tales and traditions that are past on orally from generation to generation such a central aspect for Uzbeks.

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