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Bielefelder Kunstverein presents Maryam Jafri Backdrop

Bielefelder Kunstverein presents Maryam Jafri Backdrop, 9 February–28 April 2013.


Maryam Jafri, Grid #6: Ramoji Film City, Software Office Film Set (detail), 2012. Archival ink jet print, 20 x 30 cm. Courtesy of Maryam Jafri.

Maryam Jafri works primarily with the media of video, photography, text and performance. She takes a research-based approach to her work that frequently results in extensive video and photo installations. In these works, Jafri combines specific temporal and cultural zones. In the process, she uses various narrative forms and consciously fictionalises documentary archive material.

Maryam Jafri is showing two current works from the last couple of years, Global Slum (2012) and Avalon (2011), on the Kunstverein’s ground floor. Alongside them, the artist is presenting a new series of photographic works, which she has developed especially for the exhibition at the Bielefelder Kunstverein. The three-part group of works, “Getty vs. Ghana”, “Corbis vs. Mozambique”, “Getty vs. Kenya vs. Corbis” (2012) links to questions about the role of images already raised in Jafri’s ongoing project, “Independence Day 1936–1967″ (since 2009). The new series contrasts with the earlier work by shifting the economic value of these photographs onto centre stage. In this work combining photos and texts, Jafri does not investigate the techniques of representation but instead investigates the cultural value in the histories of how these states develop.

Maryam Jafri, born in 1972 in Pakistan, lives and works in Copenhagen and New York. The artist’s most recent solo exhibitions have appeared at the Museet for Samtidskunst (Roskilde, Denmark), the exhibition space Beirut (Cairo, Egypt) and the CAAC Sevilla (all 2012). Following her exhibition at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (2006), the Bielefelder Kunstverein is organising Jafri’s second solo exhibition in Germany.

Bielefelder Kunstverein
im Waldhof
Welle 61
D-33602 Bielefeld
www.bielefelder-kunstverein.de

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