Transparent Control: Interview with Maryam Jafri
By Ysabelle Cheung
Portrait of Maryam Jafri. Photo by Kristof Vrancken. All images courtesy the artist and Laveronica arte contemporanea, Modica.
In his manifesto defending classical liberalism, “The Road to Serfdom,” Anglo-Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek warned “of the danger of tyranny that inevitably results from government control of economic decision-making through central planning.” Aligning the economic power of central government with that of megacorporations, Maryam Jafri articulates society’s collective subservience and the capitalist power dynamics that govern these experiences, through video works such as Avalon (2011)—in which Asian female factory employees sew body bags and jackets that, unbeknownst to them, will be sold as fetish wear to Euro-American clients—to a project exploring the ongoing colonization of state independence by stock photo agencies, and her more recent installation works synthesizing the language of economics and politics into puzzle installations. Although the geography, subjects and themes are wide-ranging and disparate, Jafri’s narratives are connected by the same essential hierarchy of information and control, which uncovers the complex, interlinked mechanisms behind global patterns of consumerism, labor and agency, and the interstitial spaces that we—and the artist—might be able to occupy. On the occasion of Jafri’s comprehensive solo exhibition “Roads to Serfdom, Repaved,” mounted at Taxipalais Kunsthalle Tirol earlier this year, I reached out to the artist over email to engage in a conversation on capitalism, exploitation and the stranger-than-fiction elements that are inherent in her videos, installations and photographs.
