The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

53 vehicle the narrative and aesthetic preoccupations of their time and place of origin, may be interpreted, their motifs extrapolated and reconfigured. Maryam Bayani’s Dastane Sofal (The Pottery Tale) 2008 uses what she identifies as the ‘motion potential’ in patterns drawn from about 165 different pieces of prehistoric pottery from different regions of the Iranian Plateau, animating these to music. 4 Movement is suggested in different ways; for example, two positions of the motif of a group dancing helped the filmmaker to extrapolate a type of ancient dance. In other cases, the motion elaborates on a single image and its references to a story or symbol: A good example here is the story of the growth of plants from ox’s blood and the symbolic concept of the antler, representing a plant, which made a relationship between the hunter, ox, deer and plant to create a scene manifesting life coming out of the death. 5 When a contemporary animator brings to life a dance form or constellation of symbols recorded in another medium in another era, the circulation of motifs modifies the context of production and viewing, creating new possibilities — what Elsaesser calls ‘new diegetic worlds or new media ontologies’; 6 he gives the example of the rediscovery by artists of early and classical cinema practices in what has been called ‘the cinema effect’. 7 This finds expression also in the reworking of other forms of art and literature through animation. Seyyed Morteza Ahadi’s Gonjeshk va Panbeh Daneh ( The Sparrow and the Boll ) 2007 is a textile animation which shows the stages of fabrication of its own medium. Using cut-out elements of felt, jute cloth, wood and threads, Ahadi tells an old Persian tale that exists in different regional variants, recounting the adventures of a sparrow and the farmer who is determined to catch it. A young girl helps the sparrow to escape from a trap; the bird holds a cotton boll in its beak which is first spun, then dyed, then woven before being offered to the girl to fix her skirt. Particular art forms or technologies are valorised in particular histories, and function to normalise and promote the world view of a particular place. In his monograph of 2006, The Theft of History , cultural historian Jack Goody points, for example, to the high value that celebrated French historiographer Fernand Braudel gives the use of a table as an indicator of culture and progress, when he records that the Arabs did not have the use of them; Goody suggests that ‘it might equally be claimed that Europeans did not have the carpet or the divan until they arrived from the east’. 8 The carpet is a social and aesthetic, even spiritual, form which circulates in an economy of identity and value in Iranian literature, art and animation. It links the domestic space to these other realms. Farhad Moshiri, an Iranian artist who is showing a series of paintings in APT6, has previously fabricated both prosaic and political manifestations of the Persian carpet: Flying Carpet 2007 consists of a pile of carpets from which cut-outs of stealth bomber planes have been Vadjiollah Fard Moghadam Iran b.1945 Production still from Lili Lili Hosak (Lily Lily Little Pool) 1992 / 35mm, colour, stereo, 16 minutes, Iran / Image courtesy: Kanoon, Tehran Abdollah Alimorad Iran b.1947 Production still from Bache ha dar Moozeh (Children at the Museum) 1987 / 35mm, colour, stereo, 10 minutes, Iran / Image courtesy: Kanoon, Tehran