Mamali Shafahi

A recurrent thread running through Mamali's projects since his first performances in France in the early 2000s has been a focus on transgression and testing limits, involving a reversal of roles between artist and others - participants, the public, and most recently his parents - to see how far the latter will go in their new role as protagonist. Artists have special powers: to take part in an art project, people can be persuaded to step far outside their usual perimeters, abandoning constraints, questioning taboos, challenging their preconceptions… The roles of artist and model, producer and consumer, subject and object, dominator and subordinate... are thus perverted. The participant or viewer takes an active role and the artist loses absolute control over the finished experience: artists and participants are changed or even transformed - in some cases, for life. This process of interaction, the blurring of boundaries between the artist and others, the shifting locus of power, the potentially perverse possibilities it opens up, underpin all of Mamali's practice, whatever the issue he is investigating: taboo and breaking taboos, narcissism and voyeurism, intergenerational exchange, domestic perversity, addiction and self-destruction, the impact of new technologies and 'post-body' immortality…