Mamali Shafahi (B. 1982, lives in Amsterdam and Paris) is a film-maker and video installation artist. His practice, varying from installation to sculpture and film, includes a deep fascination with the impact of emerging technologies on life and art. His early work in France, at the Paris-Cergy school of fine arts, focused on performance. He then produced a number of video installations, and his investigation of relationships between past, present, future and emerging technologies led to the V[i]Rology installation at the Mohsen Gallery, in 2017. From 2014 to 2017 he worked on an experimental docu-fiction film, Nature Morte, involving his parents as both actors and digital characters, screened at Art Rotterdam, in Taiwan and London. In 2019 he made an installation combining his father’s drawings with his own installation, sculptures and the film for City Princes/ses at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. His VR projects, with Ali Eslami, have featured at Het nieuwe instituut, Rotterdam, the Vancouver Biennale, IDFA film festival in Amsterdam and CPH DOX, Copenhagen. The nerd_funk VR project won the ‘Golden Calf’ for best interactive work at the 2020 Netherlands Film Festival. ///
Mamali Shafahi mostly works through medium or long-term, themed projects that lead, as they develop, to works on film or video, performance, sculptures, objects and immersive installations. A recurrent thread running through his projects since his first performances in France in the early 2000s has been a focus on transgression and testing limits, involving a reversal of rôles between artist and others - participants, public, and most recently his parents - to see how far the latter will go in their new rôle as protagonist. Artists, Mamali states, have special powers: to take part in an art project, people can be persuaded to step far outside their usual perimeters, abandoning constraints, questioning social limits, challenging preconceptions... The roles of artist and model, producer and consumer, subject and object, dominator and subordinate... are thus perverted. The viewer takes an active role and the artist loses absolute control over the finished experience. Processes of interaction, deconstruction and reinvention, blurring boundaries between artist and others, shifting hierarchies, the potentially perverse possibilities they open up, underpin all Mamali’s practice, whatever the issue he is investigating: nature and nurture, narcissism and voyeurism, domestic perversity, addictions and self-destruction, the impact of new technologies and ‘post-body’ immortality.