Mali Arun
Mali Arun (France, 1987) is a videographer and director. Her work is situated between fiction, documentary film and video art, it questions and explores spaces on the margins, in movement or in conflict. Mali Arun has exhibited in numerous venues and festivals in France and internationally, including the Palais de Tokyo (Paris) in 2019, the Foam Museum (Amsterdam) in 2020 and the Lyon Biennale in 2022.
She graduated from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2013 and won the Grand Prix du Salon Montrouge in 2018.
As part of her residency at the French Academy in Rome, Mali Arun is writing the screenplay for a film, a documentary essay in a long format, which mixes reality and fiction. This narrative will tell the story of her family and her ancestors: she grew up in a family split between France, Germany, Turkey, Thailand and China. Each member of her family has been in exile, on both her mother and her father’s side, for more than three generations. All of them live far from their roots; all of them have rewritten their history, reinvented their identity and their territory, for personal, historical and economic reasons. This film tells the story of a complex and fascinating epic. A singular family story that spans the 20th century, which was plagued by wars, and a contemporary globalised world where roots and landmarks are disappearing in favour of streamlining and standardisation. Mali Arun’s work also focuses on the Chinese community of Prato (Tuscany), which embodies these issues related to identity, migration and globalisation, as a mirror of her own story.
Photo portrait © Daniele Molajoli
Video portrait © Laurent Perreau pour l’Académie de France à Rome – Villa Médicis