The performance reenacts a scene from Han Mengyun’s film Gift (2025), in which she encounters a woman on horseback in the desert of AlUla, Saudi Arabia. As she follows this figure through sand and palm groves, she recalls stories once carried along the Silk Road—Layla and Majnun, Yusuf and Zulaikha, the Persian prince Humay and the Chinese princess Humayun. These tales of distant lovers once shaped shared imaginaries across cultures, binding geographies through longing, recognition, and misunderstanding.

Rather than seeking to identify the woman, Han turns the encounter inward, asking what kind of relation might be possible between them today. What does it mean to meet across difference without conquest, projection, or desire for mastery? The pearl becomes her guiding metaphor. In Arabo–Perso–Indo poetic traditions, the pearl signifies poetry itself; to offer a pearl is to offer a poem. In many of the languages along these routes—Hindi, Urdu, Persian (زبان), Arabic (لسان)—the words for tongue and language are one and the same. Language is an organ. Reading another’s poem is therefore an intimate act of touch: a meeting of tongues, a deliberate opening of oneself to the other, accepting the risk of transformation inherent in such trust. By learning another tongue, one is reshaped by it—becoming another voice, another sensibility, another world.

The performance unfolds as a gesture of poetic offering and vulnerability, reactivating fragile threads of cultural memory and imagining new forms of relation between women, languages, and histories.

Performers: Han Mengyun, Ali Reem

Video Installation: single channel 4K video, stereo sound, color, loop

Music by Tara Al Dughaither

Performance commissioned for Asia NOW 11th Edition “Grow”, curated by Arnaud Morand

Supported by Arts AlUla and French Agency for AlUla Development (AFALULA)