Behzad Khosravi Noori: One Belt Many Roads (2022, 30 sec excerpt)

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Distribution: Filmform – The Art Film and Video Archive

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ENG:
From the vantage point of the British Clifton Beach toward the China port, this short video essay is the point of departure to narrate the multiplicity and the universality of the medieval Islamicate Saif al-Muluk’s Tale and the colonial practice in the region.
Saif al-Mulūk and Badīʿ al-Jamāl’s ( حكايت سيف الملوك و بديع الجمال) is a survey for seeking love from Egypt to China. It is an epic romance tale of travel across the Indian Ocean world, told and retold from 13th c. It was a later addition to the One thousand and one night and Arabian fables. The story is one of the most compelling epic tales with transnational characteristics that emphasize the religio-ethical ideas in the Indian Ocean world and beyond.

The seven minutes essayistic video tells a story about the story. It proposes artistic research as a method and possibility of historical reenactment of the premodern tale about the contemporary time and place. It argues the effect of colonialism on the life of the local/indigenous fishers in the port of Ibrahim Hyderi in Karachi.

The intersection of the story of three locations ( British Clifton Beach, China port, and Ibrahim Hyderi) in conjunction with Saif al-Muluk’s tale attempts to explore the storytelling as a comparative critical and political narrative strategy to investigate the colonial history of the past to the present time.

The project is a dialogical collaboration between Behzad Khosravi Noori, artist, writer, and Taimoor Shahid Khan, writer, poet, and translator.