Mamali Shafahi: Judgment Night: Daddy Kills People
Parallel circuit presents the latest installation of Mamali Shafahi entitled "Judgment Night: My Father Kills People." The show opens on January 6 and will continue until February 6. In his third collaboration with Dastan Gallery, he will exhibit an enormous installation of pieces covered in ultramarine blue velvet.
Amidst the spectacular ruins and remnants of a primitive and faraway land, Mamali Shafahi stages a manipulated tale that has already taken place. In "Judgment Night: Daddy Kills People", we come too late, not witnessing the actual event but imagining the narrative from its remains.
Here, Shafahi, who is used to decentralizing the creative process, invites us to seek and imagine an event in the memory of residing objects – a past traceable in the residues of a party.
He persists in summoning the artist's creative capacities beyond himself in a continuous attempt to invite the spectator to take part in the creation of meaning. His show leaves it open for the spectator to interpret the narrative; in this way, he does away with the notion of a solitary artist by means of convocation and by sharing the fruits with his participants.
Employing the means and materials used for movie sets and amusement parks, the artist looks at fear from a distance. Events influence the theatrical props and objects present in the show, and they reflect and relate the narrative. "Judgement Night: Daddy Kills People" raises the spectator's tolerance in facing horror by raising the curtain on his/her primal fears.
A video shows us the party attendees: seven goats, a flute player, a drummer, and a basketball player interacting with the elements of Shafahi's world. The viewer edits these images, encoding and decoding the narrative and its elements in his/her imagination.
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. 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.
