NEW YORK, NY.- Swiss Institute is presenting the first solo exhibition in the United States by Uzbek artist and filmmaker Saodat Ismailova. Ismailova’s films and installations unfold along the fault lines of Central Asian landscapes steeped in ritual and myth, shifting borders and migration, and the invisible forces of empire shaping the psycho-material terrains of the present. The exhibition revolves around the world premiere of the first iteration of Ismailova’s newly commissioned film Amanat (2026), whose title references that which is entrusted in one’s care, and denotes a sacred responsibility that demands to be honored, protected, and passed on. The film marks the concluding chapter of Ismailova’s long-term engagement with Arslanbob, a vast walnut forest in present-day Kyrgyzstan, revered for centuries as a spiritual site. Through the prism of its cosmologies and ecologies, Amanat considers how memory is metabolized in moments of profound cultural and political change, asking what becomes (un)speakable when the very conditions of belief come under pressure.
In the exhibition, reality is processed somatically, foregrounding how we sense and articulate truth under complex political conditions. When cultural and ecological landscapes shift — or come under assault — do we stay bound or leave, hold on to past certainties or change? Probing the role of myth, dreams, and the sensorium in shaping our sense of self, Amanat explores what can be sensed and spoken, what is transplanted across space and transmuted across time, and what eventually fades away.
In connection with the exhibition, a screening at MoMA on April 6, 2026 will present a selection of Ismailova’s films.
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 & Albert Museum, London; and the Almaty Museum of Arts, Kazakhstan; among others.
The exhibition is curated by Stefanie Hessler, Director of SI.
Tiran Willemse: Dweller
Swiss Institute (SI) is pleased to present Dweller, the first solo exhibition by artist, dancer, and choreographer Tiran Willemse. Dweller marks Willemse’s debut exploration of moving image and sound, informed by years of training in classical ballet, rigorous studies of African dances, and collaborative ventures in experimental theater and performance. Continuing the artist’s focus on the politics of embodiment, Dweller employs ritualistic choreographies of sound and gesture to navigate the ecstatic threshold between movement and stasis, form and formlessness, reason and unreason.
Willemse’s works grant visceral, poetic form to the historical and contemporary specters that haunt colonized minds, bodies, and lands. Working beyond humanist frames of recognition and redress, and responding to regimes of structural violence, Dweller proposes ritual, exorcism, and momentary surrenders to insanity as corporeal technologies of transgenerational endurance.
SI will present Willemse’s live performance work, Untitled (Nostalgia: Act 3), in collaboration with Danspace Project on January 23 & 24, 2026.
Tiran Willemse was born in South Africa and lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland. Recent performances have been presented at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts, Lausanne; Museo MACRO, Rome; Serralves Museum, Porto; Roskilde Festival, Roskilde; and Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki. Willemse won the Swiss Performance Prize in 2023.
Dweller is curated by KJ Abudu, Associate Curator | Public Programs & Residencies.
