Mamali Shafahi: Available works

Mamali Shafahi (B.1982, lives in Amsterdam) 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. 

To fully digest the properties of each medium and master the myriad associations a theme might signify, Mamali Shafahi often engages in projects that require years of practice and revisions. A central theme in these long-term engagements is to challenge the relationship between the artist and the other in a call for participation in the artwork. Shafahi’s works tend to incorporate the other as a protagonist in their creative processes and discursive premises, revisiting the dichotomy of the artist/audience with a wide range of participants – most recently the artist’s own parents.

The works in Daddy Tissue is the latest sequel to the ‘Daddy Sperm’ project that Shafahi started in 2012. Fascinated by the transformation he calls “the miracle of life”, he explores the force of life and creation as it circulates between humans and from generation to generation. In this series, he investigates the mutations of identities and agencies – mutations that simultaneously delineate and are delineated by social constructs. For him, the transformation of one drop of liquid into a creative subjectivity in a human body is a fair formulation of this miracle of life.

Text by Nigel Wilkinson