BASEL.- Involving video, photography, text, sculpture, and installation, Maryam Jafri’s (*1972) practice sits at the crossroads of cultural anthropology and conceptual art. Her work has its foundations in hard-nosed research and often includes an impressive array of documentary material that is rife with economic, political, and social implications. Her treatment and contextualization of that found matter connects to a conceptual photographic tradition that runs from Ed Ruscha to Christopher Williams as well as to cinema and theater — much more than it does to so-called “research based” art. Her mordant works are driven by interrogations of global capitalism and power as well as theatrical staging, embodiment, and ritual.

For her Kunsthalle Basel exhibition, Generic Corner , Jafri’s fist solo show in Switzerland and her largest exhibition to date, the Pakistan-born American artist presents a combination of older pieces, along with two new bodies of work. These new works comprising the series, Generic Corner , have involved the artist's extensive research into the release of "generic" foodstuff and household products. Many of these are no longer circulating on the market and display a pared down graphic aesthetic as well as conveying a utopian idea of reaching the masses via low cost, no frills products. She would show actual objects, displayed like readymade sculptures, alongside photographic and text pieces related to the project. She also expanded a work she began several years ago entitled, Product Recall: An Index of Innovation , in which the artist collects already produced but rare products that have been recalled from the market for one reason or another. Revealing issues of market demand, economics, and speculations about consumer desire, both these new bodies of work connect to and interestingly extend the issues tackled elsewhere in Jafri's oeuvre—whether in her works about the fantasies connected to S/M role-playing, the global production of erotic paraphernalia ( Avalon , 2011), or the privatization of copyright in the digital age. Like in her work Getty vs. Ghana from 2012, in which Jafri shows that the stock photo agency Getty Images copyrighted photos from Ghana's independence day that belong to the Ghana Ministry of Information.

Geboren 1972 in Karachi, Pakistan, lebt und arbeitet in Kopenhagen und New York (USA) / Born 1972 in Karachi, Pakistan, lives and works in Copenhagen and New York (USA)

The exhibition benefits from the support of the Danish Arts Foundation.