Commissioned by the inaugural Bukhara Biennale, Dhikr grew from my search for the folk songs that once accompanied carpet weaving and textile-making in Uzbekistan, rooted in my long-standing interest in textile as women’s writing and embodied practice. Surveying workshops across the Fergana Valley and Samarkand—historic centers of textile trade—I discovered a profound absence of singing. Modernization played a role: weavers now wear earphones, listening to personal music or watching shows on their phones. Soviet industrialization further disrupted tradition, banning indigenous spiritual practices that underpinned the weaving episteme. No weaver recalled songs tied to their work. Confronting this historical amnesia, I began to notice other forms of music—children crying, women chatting, the plucking of carpet strings, the creaking loom, moments of prayer, and the deafening roar of Soviet-era machines. These soundscapes reveal what escapes the eye: traditional textile’s maternal lineage manifested in women’s domestic lives enmeshed in workplace, the workers’ daily sonic and physical overload, and mechanized looms as living archives of machine-worship. Layered cumulatively, the sonic score builds toward a climax reminiscent of the ecstatic experience of Sufi dhikr, the ritualized remembrance of God through repetitive invocation, juxtaposing Soviet devotion to machinery with Islamic devotion to God—two coexisting systems of rhythm shaping everyday life under industrialization

Sound in this film also serves as a prism, through which the audiences might encounter the lives of the Other by inhabiting their acoustic reality and multiplicity. If music heals, the jarring repetitions in Dhikr summons the ghosts of the past and shows what was broken and imposed, and what continues to haunt the living, while acknowledging what remains after systematic erasure—the enduring love of the mother, spiritual devotion, and the unfinished promise of socialist liberation.

Dhikr

Exhibition Version: 2025, single channel 4K digital video, color, stereo sound, 34 minutes 31 seconds

Cinema Version: 2026, single channel 4K digital video, color, stereo sound, 21 minutes

Country of Origin: UK

Country of Filming: Uzbekistan

Format: 4K Apple ProRes 4444/DCP, Stereo Sound

Aspect Ratio: 16:9 Languages: English, Persian Subtitles: English

Made with women weavers in Margilan and Samarkand, Uzbekistan, commissioned by the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF) for the inaugural Bukhara Biennial: Recipes for Broken Hearts, Uzbekistan, curated by Diana Campbell. The work is jointly supported by ACDF and ShanghART Gallery.

CREDITS

Writer & Director: Han Mengyun

Director of Photography: Artem Ibatullin


Assistant Camera: Muslim Mardanov


Focus Puller: Tonya Solovyeva


Sound Recordist: George Rogov


Gaffer: Vlad Museev


Spark: Zarifov Alisher, Sobirov Hamid


Driver: Mikhail Minosyan


Editor: Han Mengyun, River Cao


Sound Design & Mix: Cam Deas


Colorist: Colour Grading Priory Post


Production Assistant: Yi Lu, Yingtong Lin