A film of the making of the recreation of the Court of Gayumars
 
Re-creating and re-iterating one of the most famous manuscript miniature paintings of all time, the Court of Gayumars by Sultan Muhammad (c.1525) is a generative labour of love, and part of Vaishali Prazmari’s mission to raise awareness in a comprehensive way about Indo-Persian painting. It is incorporated into her overall body of work inspired by the epic 1001 Arabian Nights. The original painting is from the Shahnameh (King’s Book of Kings) of Shah Tahmasp, Ferdowsi’s epic poem with many parallels and mirrors in the Nights, and evokes a lost golden age from the mythical pre-Anthropocene vegetarian and vegetable past where animals and humans lived together in harmony. Green lushness is echoed by stunning colours in the anthropomorphic rocks which were painted with pigments which were themselves crushed rocks. Surrounded by nature, humans are part of the continuum before they are taught culture and civilisation by the legendary king Gayumars. It is a pre-city painting. The Nights themselves start with an ocean, the Sanskrit Kathasaritsagara, the Ocean of the Sea of Stories which dates back to even earlier story cycles that started in time immemorial. The memory of the brushstrokes of past masters looms in the present muscle moment of painting where they are being re-made but also slightly changed in the process. The process of transformation is a magical one and echoed at small and grand scales through the Nights. Humans are turned into animals which are djinn in disguise which are hidden divs in the rocks which are secret ifrit spouses which are transformed tyrants changed into repentant husbands. All through the transfixing power of storytelling narrated by the creatrix Shahrazad, herself born of the city, who through her subtle art makes king Shahriyar, the companion of the city, undergo a slow sea-change and immersion in the moonlit nightly tales within tales within tales that take a thousand nights and a night. Change is soft and subtle like the silvery moon monthly cycle and gradient faded shades of skin tones and carpet tones within Vaishali’s 1001 works in progress like a multitude of cliffhanger stories that are never quite finished but that wax and wane on to the next night. Circular compositions and labyrinthine forms are stretched into ovals and egg shapes and eccentric spirals that burst out of the margin because they are too fertile, too ovular and too full of liquid life to be contained. The woman who births stories and children cannot be constrained by the frame which changes to a tightrope edge to walk across, balancing it all, dropping some balls on either side of the margins but keeping forwards in time, the tightrope edge morphing into a metaphor for life itself, walking a thin line like the thin lines of miniature painting outlines which bring equal sharpness to the tiniest humblest leaf as to the buttons on an emperor’s clothes edged in gold and mirrored by the vast golden gilt sunlit sky, interrupted nightly by a tale which gives it form, which is continued…