Mali Arun

Mali Arun (France, 1987) is a video artist and director. Her work lies somewhere between fiction, documentary film and art video, questioning and exploring spaces on the margins, in movement or in conflict. Mali Arun has exhibited at numerous venues and festivals in France and abroad, including the Palais de Tokyo (Paris) in 2019, the Foam Museum (Amsterdam) in 2020 and the Lyon Biennial 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 Villa Médicis, Mali Arun is writing the script for a film, a long-form documentary essay that blends reality and fiction. It will tell the story of her family and her ancestors: she grew up in a family split between France, Germany, Turkey, Thailand and China. Every member of her family has been in exile, on both her mother’s and father’s sides, for more than three generations. All of them live far from their roots; all have rewritten their history, reinvented their identity and their territory, for reasons that are at once personal, historical and economic. This film tells the story of a complex and fascinating epic. A singular family story straddling a war-torn 20th century and a contemporary globalized world where roots and landmarks are disappearing in favor of smoothing and standardization. Mali Arun’s work also focuses on the Chinese community of Prato (Tuscany), which embodies these issues of identity, migration and globalization, like a mirror to its own history.