The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

56 to escape not only the artworld, but all “worlds” as disciplinary regimes’. 11 In his writings on what he calls ‘polyculturalism’ (as opposed to multiculturalism), cultural theorist Vijay Prashad posits, like Elsaesser, that ‘the task of the historian is not to carve out the lineages but to make sense of how people live culturally dynamic lives’ which partake of a ‘host of lineages’. Cultural phenomena and individual lives are both coherent and extremely complex and open: ‘Social interaction and struggle produces cultural works, and these are in constant, fraught formation’. 12 As an infinitely varied visual field which reworks cultural forms, Iranian animation expresses many historical lineages and geographical relationships; working against tendencies to cultural homogenisation, these works offer ways of seeing that displace and expand visual experience, and make new, located, and always provisional, visual worlds. Endnotes 1 The pot is held in the National Museum of Iran in Tehran. 2 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘The new film history as media archaeology’, Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies , vol.14, no.2–3, Spring 2004, pp.75–117. 3 Elsaesser, paragraph 32. 4 The music, inspired by the folk music of Baluchistan, was composed and adapted by Shir-mohammad Espandar. 5 Maryam Bayani, email to the author, 10 September 2009. 6 Elsaesser, paragraph 54. 7 Elsaesser, paragraph 1. See also The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image [exhibition catalogue], Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 2008; Cinéma Cinéma: Contemporary Art and the Cinematic Experience [exhibition catalogue], Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 1999; Art and Film since 1945: The Hall of Mirrors [exhibition catalogue], Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and The Monacelli Press, New York, 1996; Spellbound: Art and Film [exhibition catalogue], Hayward Gallery and British Film Institute, London, 1996; Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel (eds), Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film , MIT Press, Boston, 2003. 8 Jack Goody, The Theft of History , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006, p.185. 9 Édouard Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers , Gallimard, Paris, 1996, p.34. 10 Jasleen Dhamija, Living Traditions of Iran’s Crafts , Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi, and Farabi University, Tehran, 1979, p.63–4. 11 Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left , Verso, London and New York, 2003, p.73. 12 Vijay Prashad, Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity , Beacon Press, Boston, 2001, p.148. Laleh Khorramian Iran b.1974 I Without End (single channel) (still) (detail) 2008 / Digital betacam, colour, stereo, 6:20 minutes, Iran / Image courtesy: The artist and Salon 94, New York