ART CITIES:Los Angeles-Maryam Jafri
For the past fifteen years Maryam Jafri has worked across varied media including expanded sculpture, video, and photography, with a specific interest in questioning the cultural and visual representation of history, politics, and economy. Her practice is informed by a research-based, interdisciplinary process that draws upon diverse traditions from literature and theater to pop and conceptual art.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: ICA LA Archive
Maryam Jafri’s solo exhibition “I Drank the Kool-Aid But I Didn’t Inhale”, the artist’s first institutional exhibition in US, is on presentation at the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (ICA LA). The exhibition presents a new staging of Jafri’s sculptural installation “Product Recall: An Index of Innovation” (2014-15), the work combines framed texts and “still life” product photography of unsuccessful food products from the private archive of an anonymous former brand consultant and found objects amassed from the personal collections of other food industry figures. These elements combine to recount an alternative cultural history of industrialized food production in the 20th century that focuses on products that were either recalled or failed to find widespread consumer appeal. With reference to the vernacular language, imagery and iconography of advertising and product displays, “Product Recall: An Index of Innovation” reveals how agribusiness and the innovations of laboratory science are implicated in the mass circulation and consumption of everyday commodities. Very often Maryam Jafri’s research for one work leads to the starting point for another work in a different media, such as “Product Recall: An Index of Innovation” (2014-15) that grew out of initial research for the video “Mouthfeel“ (2014). The two works stand independently of one another but also constitute a dialogue between themes, media, and approaches. Her most recent work, “Generic Corner” (2015), focuses on another neglected aspect of American consumer culture – the once widespread, now mostly forgotten black and white generic items that graced supermarkets across USA in the late 1970s and 80s. “Independence Day 1934-1975” (2009- ) is fueled by her interest in questions of heritage and the archive, and the role of photography in the formation of national narratives during the process of decolonization in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Her works often bring together both found and original material, whether in installation or moving image formats. In her video “Avalon” (2011) staged scenes were combined with documentary footage to offer a meditation on the links between affect, labor, and commodity under contemporary global conditions. Above all her interdisciplinary art practice is grounded in an engagement with the formal and conceptual qualities of each media, periods of extensive research and planning, and the mysterious but crucial role played by forces that lie outside deliberation and preparation such as accident, chance, and intuition.
Info: Curator: Jamillah James, the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (ICA LA), 1717 E. 7th Street, Los Angeles, Duration: 10/2-23/6/19, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 11:00-19:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.theicala.org
