Mamali Shafahi, Deep Throats: How Deep is your Love?
Friday Dispatch – 21 October 2022
Mamali Shafahi, Deep Throats: How Deep is your Love?
VITRNE, Fitzrovia
11 October – 17 December 2022
Deep Throats: How Deep is your Love?’ at Vitrine, Fitzrovia, is Mamali Shafahi’s first solo present within the UK. In his sculptures and wall reliefs produced in epoxy resin, which can be then spray painted with automobile paint and flocked, the Iranian artist and filmmaker recollects historical Persian pictorial and storytelling traditions.
‘In Persian fables, as in lots of historical cultures, the principle characters are animals. I’m very influenced by these fables, for instance Kalila and Dimna, wherein animals substitute people to inform tales. In my work, animals are the autos via which I discuss modern points, or the merging between the modern and the previous’ is how the artist describes his apply.
When approaching the gallery’s store window our consideration is straight away captured by Heirloom Velvet, 2022, a brightly colored, rotating determine with human and animal options, and by How deep are your eyes, 2022, a vibrant wall reduction fashioned in resin that features an ape’s and a snake’s head surrounded by plant-like ornaments and bugs. Each works are set towards a grid of pink tape on a white short-term wall, and it feels as if we’re instantly dragged into an immersive digital world inhabited by monsters and fantastical creatures. The doorway space’s visage utterly modifications throughout the night time when the sculptures are lit by UV lighting, inflicting them to look in shades of fluorescent blue.
In the principle gallery 4 brilliant blue totemic wall works with the title How deep is your mouth, 2022, depict monkeys violently coated in chains. With their mouths huge open, they appear to be filled with anger and aggression. On the alternative wall, two gorillas, a father and son, are holding palms between the sharp tooth, within the open mouth of a giant snake. The gorillas, snakes and different animals create a scenario that’s directly puzzling, scary, and violent but additionally playful – maybe recalling the farcical violence of cartoons many people have loved in our childhood.
A choice of new wall-based reliefs which can be a part of the artist’s iconic Heirloom Velvet, 2022, collection are exhibited within the decrease floor ground gallery. The newly developed work displays the artist’s collaboration along with his father, highlighting a transgenerational dialogue, the place the daddy’s drawings are playfully reimagined within the son’s artworks, which, just like the sculptures upstairs, ends in hybrid works, that includes fantastical creatures each human and animal.
General, Mamali Shafahi’s works sits between kitsch, popular culture and historical past. By giving his sculptures a futuristic and outer-worldly look, the artist goals to make historical Persian mythologies look extra visually engaging for the following era. His purpose is to attach younger folks, who grew up within the digital age, with the richness of their historical cultural pasts. In Deep Throats: How Deep is your Love? the artist’s placing flocked sculptures grow to be virtually immaterial, like holograms or pictures on sensible telephones to mirror that expertise has more and more blurred the traces between previous and current. Shafahi’s fantastical creatures at VITRINE powerfully convey again a number of the historical magic that, based on the artist, in our instances, once we spend most of our time scrolling via pictures on our smartphones, we’ve got misplaced.
Christine Takengny
Senior Curator
38 Riding House Street, London, W1W 7ES
Opening Occasions: Wednesday – Saturday, 12 – 6pm
Exhibition open till 17th December 2022
