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SHOWREEL
motiroti is a London based international arts organisation.
We create and produce original works combining new media, visual and performing arts for intimate as well as public spaces. Our multi-layered projects are led by participation and collaboration.
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Journeys of Love and More Love is the story of a man – and many men - the milestones in his life journey and the key people that influenced his development across continents and in between social and cultural divides. The show is a 1-hour performance mixing projected media and a threecourse meal as a live installation. The story is the personal tale of Ali Zaidi’s migration journeys from Bombay to Lahore to London chronicling the loves and lives of his friends and family and the food he encountered along the way. It intersperses personal and public archive images and historical events with interview footage of contemporary migrant stories in Naples and London, ranging from academics to streetsellers, business entrepreneurs to illegal workers.
By fusing his own experience with the life of migrant people encountered throughout his life, motiroti’s Artistic Director Ali Zaidi opens up wider questions about identity and the sense of belonging in a world where things are constantly on the move – the incessant fluctuation between being a guest and being at home. Ali Zaidi says: “Indian by birth, Pakistani by migration and British by chance, I like to draw upon this cultural displacement to pursue creative explorations of commonality and difference.”
Warm, colourful and yet melancholic, Journeys of Love and More Love unfolds stories of cultural and geopolitical mobility and displacement, where ‘love’ is the driving force that allows questions to be asked and connections to be made.
Trailer from London presentation
Trailer from Naples presentation
Fresh artistic voices that go behind the headlines and beyond the rhetoric
The first 360° programme, 60x60 Secs presents sixty one-minute films commissioned by motiroti via an open submission. Established and emerging artists from the South Asian Diaspora – twenty each from Britain, India and Pakistan – present their personal perspective on what ‘home and boundaries’ mean to them.
Using a wide and highly creative variety of media and techniques, the films uncover new voices and images, presenting comic, unsettling and arresting stories of everyday life and global events; a very different angle than the one commonly projected by the media.
60x60 Secs premiered as a multi-screen installation at Shunt and Vibe Gallery in London, UK and has had international presentations and screenings in India, Pakistan and Dubai. It has been screened within film festivals in Australia, Canada, Germany, Singapore and United States.
Individual films have been nominated in films festivals. Great Identity Swindle by Yam Boy won Best Short Film, Asian Festival of 1st Films (AFFF), Singapore and Best Short, Satyajit Ray Foundation Award. 505 by Juhi Jaferi, Komail Naqvi and Taimoor Tariq won Impact Award, Ivey Film Festival 2009, Ontario.
The project continues to be shown as installations and one-off screenings with talks.
Commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery and the Exhibition Road Cultural Group, this large-scale project engaged with over 250 local people invited from the City of Westminster and Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea.
During six one-day participatory 'Roadshows' objects of great value offered by the partner institutions inspired imaginative journeys around the notion of 'priceless' where participants shared their unique stories and memories through film and sound.
The project resulted in video installations, mobile exhibitions, a graphic installation in the South Kensington Underground foot tunnel, artist-led guided tours and a large scale public launch event on Exhibition Road.
Please download for further details of various project sections: roadshows; launch event; installations, mobile units and guided tours.
Artistic Director
Ali Zaidi
Concept and Development
Ali Zaidi, Poulomi Desai, Daniel Saul
Video
Daniel Saul
Sound and Music
Poulomi Desai
Producer
Penny Andrews
Learning Director
Janice Galloway
Administrator
Alison Bean
Production Management
Johnny Goodwin, for JOULE
This video unfolds a dialogue between the urban fabric and new cultural influences, and plays with the private sphere, the expression of the human body and public space. cutout is a video triptych, shown as an installation in galleries; cutout II is a single screen version, shown on BBC Big Screens in urban centres in major UK cities and television broadcasts.
In September 2006 cutout II was selected by the Mayor's Thames Festival as the only outdoor large-scale projection onto the National Theatre's Lyttelton flytower. Streams of images and blasts of colour from the flytower reached out to Londoners and was visible from many locations. The view from Waterloo Bridge was spectacular!
Alladeen draws on the lives of people living in the global cities of New York, London, and Bangalore—each a city where many cultures collide, both in virtual and material reality. Aladdin's story is a perfect vehicle for this "collision" since it is one that has been revised and re-told many times. This archetypal rags-to-riches story has travelled from Asia, to India, to England, to America, and each culture has borrowed, stolen, and reinterpreted it from the last. Similarly, the interaction of ethnicity and cultures within these sprawling metropolises blurs the line between identities, and reflects how cultures reinterpret each other's signs and stories. Alladeen traces a technological Silk Route, dissonantly mixing the global and the local in a shifting map of cultural identity. Finally, the collaboration between motiroti and The Builders Association on this project represents our own modest experiment in cultural collision.
Aladdin's fantasy of personal transformation is played out in the surreal world of Bangalore's "call centres," telemarketing centres where Indian operators learn how to "pass" as Americans. Exploring the paradoxes of identity in an age of multiple realities—the story of Aladdin is also particularly resonant for our consumerist culture in that the tale focuses on class, wealth, social status, and the fantasy of transformation: transformation of the self through acquisition and consumerism, and transformation of ordinary objects (a lamp and a ring, for instance) into manifestations of the sublime. The story can equally function as a fable about a young person's ability to land on his feet throughout a process of continual social and personal displacement.
The Alladeen project had three manifestations, all sourcing from the same material: the website, a music video, and a cross media stage performance.
Concept
Keith Khan, Marianne Weems and Ali Zaidi
Performance Directed by Marianne Weems, Website and Music Video Directed by Ali Zaidi.
Detailed credits for all the three aspects of the production are available as a downloaded. Do visit the website!
A blend of photography, soundscapes and digital media exploring cultural representations of being Asian in Britain. Three contrasting artists worked closely with over 80 participants to produce new, cleverly manipulated images and sounds of people describing themselves as British Asian; the resulting 'definitions' were aspirational, arresting, controversial, humorous and critical.
Poulomi Desai explored personal identity through a cacophony of sounds that embraced a range of dialects and languages from Urdu, Punjabi, French and English.
Zineb Sidera looked at the process of communication, censorship and experiences of being a migrant.
Ali Zaidi morphed portraits of participants asking: Do all Asians look the same? The definition of 'curry' was extended by presenting 26 different recipes and spices in neatly wrapped sachets.
Visitors were invited to contribute their own images, ideas and responses during the presentation at the Mead Gallery and the content of the installations thereby continuously evolved.
