1887

The Letters series prompts reflection on the superimposition of official and non-official languages that have succeeded each other in the Western Turkistan region since the end of the 19th century.On photographs of her family, Saodat lsmailova superimposes pieces they wrote by hand: copies of classical Persian poems; the invention of a talismanic writing combining Arabic calligraphy and encrypted inscriptions; the Uzbek language transcribed in Cyrillic characters; finally the Russian language, standardised in the last generation preceding that of the artist. The motifs, symbols and traces of a complex culture pass through the nexus of language and
its transmission.