“Dhikr” by Mengyun Han

2026 · UK/UZ · colour · En, Fa/en · 21’ · World premiere · In competition

Conceived as a sound work, Dhikr transforms the layered acoustics of Uzbek textile workshops—mechanized looms, women’s voices, prayer, and industrial roar, into a cinematic meditation that juxtaposes Soviet machine devotion with Sufi remembrance, revealing maternal lineage, historical erasure, and the haunting rhythms of industrial modernity.

Commissioned for the inaugural Bukhara Biennale, Dhikr is a sound-led meditation on textile production, historical erasure, and spiritual remembrance in Uzbekistan. The film began as a search for the folk songs once sung by women while weaving carpets and making textiles across the Fergana Valley and Samarkand. Yet in the workshops, no trace of these songs remained. Modernization had privatized listening through earphones and mobile phones, while Soviet industrialization had severed weaving from the indigenous spiritual and communal practices that once shaped it.

In place of the missing songs, Dhikr listens to what survives: women’s conversations, children crying, fingers plucking carpet strings, the creak of wooden looms, whispered prayer, and the overwhelming roar of Soviet-era machinery. Accumulated into a dense sonic composition, these sounds reveal maternal lineages embedded in women’s labor, the physical and acoustic pressures of industrial work, and machines that endure as monuments to a vanished ideology. As the rhythms intensify, the film’s score approaches the ecstatic repetition of Sufi dhikr—the ritual remembrance of God. By bringing spiritual invocation into collision with Soviet devotion to mechanization, Dhikr evokes two systems of belief that continue to shape everyday life. Its jarring repetitions summon the ghosts of what was silenced and imposed, while attending to what persists: maternal love, spiritual devotion, and the unfinished promise of liberation.

The artist

Han Mengyun is a visual artist and filmmaker based in London. Her practice is metaphorically divided into Day and Night. Her Day practice explores the entangled cultural histories of Eurasia, premodern aesthetic cosmopolitanism and transcultural hybridization. Resonant with philosopher Yuk Hui’s understanding of identity as a relational process of becoming rather than a fixed essence from a single origin, her Day practice articulates artistic subjectivity through revisiting premodern transregional connections as an active reconfiguration of historical perception in the present.

Night Practice explores personal, emotional, and psychological experiences shaped by her life as a woman and a mother. Her affinity for the night developed from an involuntary impulse to write poetry in darkness during episodes of postpartum depression. The night became a space of emancipation and a catalyst for her écriture féminine. Working across writing, moving image installation and performance, Night Practice attends to women’s utterance, gendered forms of knowledge, and questions of labour within transgenerational, transcultural, transhistorical, and inter-religious contexts.