Desert Dreaming
2022, single channel video, (11:51)
A recording of a conversation with my father as he tells of how he traveled overland to Iran and then Italy in the 70s, is overlaid with images of my uncle, among other members of my family, “visiting” holy sites in Mecca. The second half of the film uses an aural landscape drawn from the soundtrack to a famous Tamil film; Ulagam Sutrum Valiban (the youth who traveled the world) (1973), overlaid over a video promoting the Port City, Colombo’s controversial China sponsored land reclamation project. MGR, the star of the film, was born in my hometown in Sri Lanka in the same year as my grandfather. His swashbuckling characters were the fodder of dreams for a generation of young people including my aunts and uncles, even as they had to evade the strict supervision of my grandfather to watch them.
Using found archives and photo albums of my family, “Desert Dreaming” began with inquiring into all that is missing yet forms one’s consciousness in the family portrait and transforming spaces of a familial home. In investigating the recent history of Sri Lankan Muslims, the work traced labor migration to the Middle East and the micro impacts of large shifts such as the neoliberalization of the economy in the 70s, the dual civil war that began in the 80s and subsequent post-war transformations in Sri Lanka. Embracing the fluidity and interconnectedness of multiple histories, the project is now evolving into an excercise in alternative world building, where narratives of globalization shift and sit together in ways that defy teleological, linear history.
Begun in 2019, the work has progressed in multiple iterations and directions; installations, images, performance and publication.
Selected festival screenings
2023 Desert Dreaming at Forum Expanded, Berlinale, Berlin
2023 Desert Dreaming at The Land is the Living Witness, BFI Festival, London
2023 Desert Dreaming at Message to Man International Film Festival, St Petersburg
2023 Desert Dreaming at Fronteira Festival, Brasilia