The Storyteller
2012 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
12 minutes in loop
Katia Kameli
Katia Kameli’s film The Storyteller explores the cultural role of deep-rooted artistic tradition in Morocco. Marrakech’s largest public square is well known for its al-halqa , a storyteller’s circle or circle of spectators. Abderrahim Al Azalia is a hlaïqya; it is his role to animate the al-halqa. He is the carrier of this ancestral Moroccan tradition and a special storyteller who interprets Bollywood films in his own unique way. In Kameli’s film, Al Azalia intervenes in the Royal Theater of Marrakech, inside an unfinished opera house that appears like a concrete skeleton. For this performance, he interprets the plot of Satyen Bose’s 1964 film Dosti , a classic of the genre in black and white. The story comes full circle when Al Azalia shares with the crowd how Ramu and Mohan, the two protagonists of Dosti , escape their condition. As they play music, a circle forms around them. In her film, Kameli realizes a merger of oral storytelling traditions in Morocco and the exuberance of Bollywood cinema. Her work creates an opportunity for cultures to intersect in ways that make space for new interpretations and critical discourse.
Katia Kameli is a visual artist and director whose practice is rooted in its research-focused approach. Adopting an anthropological lens, cultural and historical events form the basis for her imaginative projects. In this sense, the artist considers herself a translator. For Kameli, translation is not merely an exchange between two cultures or an act of transmission, it is an expansion of meaning and form. In Kameli’s films translation is used as a tool that has the capacity to undermine binaries and destabilize hierarchical structures, especially concerning notions of authorship and the tenuous relationship between original and copy. Often, revisioning or rewriting narratives is purposefully accentuated in Kameli’s work with the intention of calling attention to the ways in which global history is in fact much more impressionable and pliant than assumed. Her practice generates critical perspectives on world events, casting such events as mutable and reflexive .
Colors:
Related works sharing similar palette
© » KADIST
Yao Qingmei
2017Satirizing an airport security checkpoint, The Ecdysiast – Molt (Body Inspection) by Yao Qingmei offers a comedic and critical inquiry into the logics underpinning collective control and surveillance culture...
© » ART AND CAKE
Displacement, Disconnection & Disruption: Alternate Perceptions of the Diasporic Experiences – Art and Cake June 12, 2023 June 15, 2023 Author Displacement, Disconnection & Disruption: Alternate Perceptions of the Diasporic Experiences Fatemeh Burnes “Wonderland” Displacement, Disconnection & Disruption: Alternate Perceptions of the Diasporic Experiences By Betty Ann Brown We are living in dystopia, in a world that is dominated by technology and disconnect, alienation, loneliness, and dysfunction...
© » KADIST
Wade Guyton
2016This untitled print by Wade Guyton depicts an iteration of elements that are characteristic of the artist’s work...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
Everything In Its Right Place: The Body Politic and the Body | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles Nabilah Said December 22, 2019 By Nabilah Said (1,400 words, 7-minute read) “You’re a guest, you’re a guest, you’re a guest.” This anodyne version of the Beauty and The Beast song played in my head as I walked through the exhibition The Body Politic and the Body , currently on at ILHAM Gallery in Kuala Lumpur...
© » KADIST
Ashmina Ranjit
2020While most of Ashmina Ranjit’s work has been large-scale installations, often immersive and site-specific, the series Hair Warp – Travel Through Strand of Universe is a brilliant concentration of both her beliefs and aesthetic...
© » KADIST
Saâdane Afif
2005In this work, Saâdane Afif quotes André Cadere’s round wooden batons using the copy share and remix principles...
© » KADIST
Robert Zhao Renhui
2012Changi, Singapore, possibly 1970s is from the series “As We Walked on Water” (2010-2012), which looks into Singapore’s history around the phenomenon of land reclamation...
© » KADIST
Wong Hoy Cheong
2009Created for the tenth Lyon Bienniale, in Days of Our Lives: Playing for Dying Mother, Wong’s ongoing negotiation of postcolonial globalization takes aim at French society...
© » KADIST
Brian Tripp
2010For many years Tripp has been involved in reviving Karuk ceremonies that had been discontinued for decades, he developed his signature abstract style, based in Karuk design, ceremonial regalia forms, and related cultural and political iconography...
© » KADIST
Eric Dizambourg
2010Eric Dizambourg’s film presents a bucolic and ludicrous world used as a background for a character who is an actor as well as a performer...
