Maryam Jafri: Product Recall
In her solo show at ICA Los Angeles, from January 13, 2019, Maryam Jafri (b. 1972, Karachi, Pakistan) presents a new staging of her project Product Recall: An Index of Innovation (2014-15). The work, composed of photographs and texts, offers an alternative cultural history of industrialized food production in the 20th century.
Through works that “explore the interface between external systems of control and individual agency,” as she once stated, Maryam Jafri’s practice can be described as a researched politico-economic critique. In her videos, photographs, sculptures and installations the Pakistani artist, who lives and works in New York and Copenhagen, deconstructs cultural clichés and mythologies, carrying out narrative experiments at the crossroads of sociology and conceptual art.
For a photographic series begun in 2009 (“Independence Day 1934-1975”), Jafri gathered archival images depicting the first independence days of over 23 Asian and African countries, including Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Ghana and Senegal. By arranging the images according to the type of event (a parade or a celebration, for instance), the artist underlines the similarities between those pictures, suggesting the complete assimilation of European models on the part of leaders of newborn nations. The subject of food production, previously addressed in a video work from 2014, Mouthful, informs the concept of Jafri’s solo show on view at ICA Los Angeles from January 13, 2019 – “I Drank the Kool-Aid But I Didn’t Inhale,” her first institutional presentation in the US. The exhibition features a new staging of Product Recall: An Index of Innovation (2014-15), which combines framed texts and “still life” photography of unsuccessful food products from the private archives of anonymous industry figures. Among those failed items, unable to tackle their competitors on the market, are a baby bottle bearing a Diet Pepsi logo or a sample of PJ Squares, a product comprised of a slice of peanut butter on one side and jelly on the other, designed to build the perfect sandwich. By offering an alternative cultural history of industrialized food production in the 20th century, Jafri reveals how agribusiness and the innovations of laboratory science are implicated in the mass circulation and consumption of everyday commodities.
“Maryam Jafri: I Drank the Kool-Aid But I Didn’t Inhale.” ICA Los Angeles. January 13 – April 21, 2019.