Nalini Malani

In Search of Vanished Blood, 2012
Single-channel digital video, duration: 11 minutes

In Search of Vanished Blood (2012) is inspired by a text from Christa Wolf’s 1983 novel Cassandra. In the single channel video play the story concerns a declining world in which Cassandra offers a way out if only we would listen and learn from the cruelties that have taken place in the past and create a more humane situation. The video play revolves around complex themes such as the curse of prophecy, the lethal position of women, and the failure of human communication.

The title and the main text in this work come from Agha Shahid Ali’s translation of the Urdu poem Lahu Ka Suragh by the Pakistani left-wing intellectual and revolutionary poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. The soundtrack is inspired by a selection of texts from Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine, Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, and the short story Draupadi by the Indian social activist and writer Mahasweta Devi, translated by Gayatri Spivak.

نالینی مالینی