Any other business

Photo: Jonathan Bassett, Vitrine Gallery, London Unlike last year*, this year I came back from my summer holidays too late for all the agitation of Paris's art week, with the first 'edition' of Paris+ by Art Basel (replacing the former FIAC), Paris Internationale and so on. But while I was away, Mamali Shafahi had three exhibitions on the go: a solo show at Vitrine Fitzrovia, in London, another at Mitterrand in Paris, and, also in Paris, some works in a group show at Strouk. In these new exhibitions, Shafahi continues to develop his work on sculptural pieces influenced by his father's paintings, now on a larger scale, and using polychrome flocking or glossy black car paint. One of the pieces, at Mitterrand, is like a children's ride, with a motor and a silly electronic ditty. It's a bit late to be posting about these shows now, but as I took some photos... The following photos are all my own. At Mitterrand: And at Strouk: Here is the link to the solo show at Vit...

In a post about Mamali Shafahi's current exhibition in Tehran , I mentioned he was also opening at Everyday in Antwerp; The exhibition is called Daddy Tissue , and as I had train tickets to Brussels for Carmen at La Monnaie, which was cancelled, I pushed on to Antwerp, had a good Belgian lunch there, and went to see the show. (Some Belgian galleries, unlike the Paris ones, have the good sense to open on Sunday, just as the Tehran galleries are open on Friday, their main visitor day.) These are a few photos I took, in particular of Mamali's monstrous 'throne':

I already explained, in a post about Iranian artist Mamali Shafahi's Heirloom Velvet project , that while Mamali continues to work with Ali Eslami on his five-part VR project, nerd_funk , he's also producing sculptural pieces influenced by his father's paintings.  In his latest exhibition, Night of Judgement/Daddy Kills People , at Parallel Circuit in Tehran, the new works are suddenly on an altogether bigger scale. As well as reliefs, there are gorilla 'totems' and large-scale free-standing sculptures, including a fountain and a rotating 'scorpion' throne. As usual, the works are fully installed, with a fluorescent grid design on walls and floors and coloured and UV lighting, and for the opening a live performance brought together a flautist, a sportsman and a flock of baby goats. Installations of this kind will soon be used to house Mamali and Ali's nerd-funk experiences, creating an immersive environment linked to the content of each VR chapter, thu...

As I said in my last post, I'm taking a brief break from my ' Art fatigue ' articles to take a look at Mamali Shafahi's new Heirloom Velvet works, featured by Dastan at Liste in Basel this year alongside some of Reza Shafahi's sketches. I've already written about Mamali's work with his dad, Reza, in a post entitled Reza Shafahi: from retired wrestler to 'outsider' artist,  focusing on Reza's work, rather than Mamali's. Here, I'll be looking at Mamali's own recent work. As I explained in the earlier article, as a part of his long-term Daddy Sperm project, Mamali asked his father Reza, a former wrestler then 72, to start drawing. The idea was basically to see if any genetic link emerged in their work. Since then, Reza has developed his own artistic practice, following his own inspiration. Meanwhile, Mamali has developed the project through successive stages and various media: an exhibition of paintings: Occidental Icons (2012), a vid...

nerd_funk is the name of an ambitious, multi-faceted project by Ali Eslami and Mamali Shafahi. Ali and Mamali are both Iranian by birth but now based mainly in Europe. Ali is from a new-technology background but has gravitated towards art, and will soon take up a two-year residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Mamali is from a fine-arts background, but has developed a strong interest in new technologies, now often at the heart of his practice. Their profiles fit together neatly, like the pieces of a puzzle; this helps explain the unique strengths of their partnership in a project that combines art and high-tech. Shared interests Mamali and Ali discovered they shared a fascination with the impact on our lives, now and in the future, for good or ill, of new and emerging technologies, along with the now-ubiquitous phenomena, such as social media, they have made possible, and it was this shared interest that cemented their partnership. They're interested in how, already, technol...

Despite the catastrophic impact of U.S. sanctions on the Iranian economy, now compounded by the Covid-19 health crisis, somehow Tehran's art scene soldiers doggedly on. There's even something of a ' movida ' in the air, as galleries established in the north of town open up spaces in the newly-trendy mid-town area, home to the Pejman Foundation's spectacular conversion of an old brewery into a multi-purpose contemporary art centre: the Argo Factory . The bravest have also creatively revamped their business models to continue, exchange rates notwithstanding, to appear at international fairs  - if and when, these days, such events actually go ahead. Interestingly, what in the west is called 'outsider art' or ' art brut ' (according to Wikipedia , 'art by self-taught or naïve art makers') is quite a strong component of the contemporary art scene in Iran, where it isn't confined to specialist spaces, but shown by 'mainstream' galleries...