Saodat Ismailova: As We Fade review - prepare to enter an unforgettably strange psychic dreamspace

Baltic, Gateshead

ASMR prophets, Soviet hypnotists, mountaintop rituals ... there is scene after scene of breathtaking beauty, elemental ambience and disorienting anxiety in this first solo UK show by the Uzbek artist film-maker

Your heart almost stops the moment you enter Saodat Ismailova's As We Fade. Within a minute, you'll forget about the outside world. The Baltic has curated a concise, brave first solo exhibition in the UK of film pieces by the Uzbek artist and film-maker. It is exhilarating, terrifying and unforgettable.

The room is dark. Four works are arranged around a padded black square in the centre for sitting or lying down on - a reference to the void, something Ismailova has been fascinated with throughout her two-decade practice. She grew up during perestroika, a period of widespread political, social and economic reform in the late 1980s, when Soviet ideology began to collapse leaving a void in the culture. Ismailova felt this deeply - her father was a cinematographer and she was on sets with him from a young age. The family lived in a building opposite the largest and oldest film studio in Uzbekistan. During perestroika, films stopped being screened in public.

The four works sing to each other across the void; they crackle, scream and collide. The atmosphere of the space is elemental - images of fire, ice and cascading currents of water recur across the projections, while you can almost feel the sand whipping the back of your neck as you listen to the powerful desert wind.

The first work that draws me towards it is the mesmerising, eponymous As We Fade, projected through 24 sheaths of silk suspended in the air, arranged in a glittering, shimmering line. The silk is significant, since the artist's homeland, Uzbekistan, sat at the heart of the ancient trade route between east and west. The number of silks mimics the old cinematic standard number of frames projected per second. The footage, found and new, is of people performing rituals on the sa