Mamali Shafahi

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 ...

Heirloom Velvet is a part of Daddy Sperm, a project Mamali started in 2012. It began as a reflection on the "miracle" of life: how a drop of liquid becomes a human being; on the artistic, creative and life cycle; on the relationship between parents and children and how they transform each other. It aims to create a bridge between generations: the parents’ generation, its traditional lifestyle and ‘classical’ references, and one steeped in new and emerging technologies, fascinated with the potential for future ‘post-body’ immortality.

As a part of this project, Mamali asked his father Reza, a f ...

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 ...