Maryam Jafri:
I Drank the Kool-Aid But I Didn’t Inhale
Project Room
Exhibitions
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Maryam Jafri (b. 1972)‘s work is informed by a research-based, interdisciplinary process, often marked by a series of narrative experiments sitting at the crossroads of cultural anthropology and conceptual art. This exhibition presents a new staging of Jafri’s Product Recall: An Index of Innovation (2014–15) which combines framed texts and “still life” product photography of unsuccessful food products from the private archives of anonymous food industry figures. This alternative cultural history of industrialized food production in the 20th century reveals how agribusiness and the innovations of laboratory science are implicated in the mass circulation and consumption of everyday commodities. This exhibition marks Jafri’s first solo institutional presentation in the United States.
Maryam Jafri: I Drank the Kool-Aid But I Didn’t Inhale is organized by Jamillah James, Curator.
Project Room exhibitions are made possible by ICA LA’s Curator’s Council. Additional support for Maryam Jafri: I Drank the Kool-Aid But I Didn’t Inhale is also provided by the Danish Arts Foundation.
Maryam Jafri (b. 1972, Karachi, Pakistan) lives and works between Copenhagen and New York. In 2018, she participated in the inaugural edition of the Front International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, An American City: Eleven Cultural Exercises. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands; Kunsthalle Basel; Betonsalon, Paris; and Gasworks, London, among others. Her work has been featured in the Sao Paolo Biennial; the Belgian Pavillion at the 57th Venice Bienniale; Manifesta 9; and the Shanghai Biennale. Recent group exhibitions include Fassbinder & Contemporary Video Art , Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Past is Present: Murals, Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit; and Meeting Points 9, Beirut Art Center. She received her MA from the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University and is an alum of the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York.
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