Mar 25 2026

Tricontinental Imaginaries at the Tashkent Film Festival: Screening and Lecture by Zumrad Mirzalieva

Wed | 7PM

On the occasion of Saodat Ismailova’s exhibition, Amanat, please join us for a lecture and the premiere screening of a new film by Zumrad Mirzalieva—one of Ismailova’s frequent collaborators. Building on Mirzalieva’s research into the Tashkent Film Festival of Asian, African and Latin American Cinema, this lecture examines a space imagined as a South–South collaboration yet shaped by Soviet geopolitical agendas. Drawing from Mirzalieva’s short film, Tashkent 58-88 (2026), and archival fragments—including footage, newsreels, letters and the festival’s programming logic—she explores how anti-imperial images circulated through an imperial system and what these tensions reveal about broader solidarity movements. In doing so, Mirzalieva attempts to develop a critical methodology for reading this archive and its consequences within contemporary cultural politics.

Please RSVP to rsvp@swissinstitute.net.

Zumrad Mirzalieva is a visual artist, researcher and cultural programmer working with photography and moving image. Her research explores themes of agency, solidarity, ecology and extraction. She is one of the Directors of the Davra research collective, a recent resident at Fabrica Research Centre, Delfina Foundation and a Magnum Foundations Fellow. She holds a Master’s degree in Social Innovation from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she focused on exploring the transformative potential of art in driving positive social change.

Image: Indian actress Deepti Naval and VGIK students Kaadi Salah Sherif (Sudan) and Kaadu Said (Lebanon) — participants of the 6th Tashkent International Film Festival of Asian, African and Latin American Countries. Credits: Central State Archive of the Documentary Films of the Republic of Uzbekistan.