Maryam Jafri is a fine artist working primarily in the medium of text, photography, video and performance − her work is often interdisciplinary, reflecting a theatrical bent. An American citizen born in Pakistan, she’s based in both New York and Copenhagen while exhibiting internationally. This exhibition, Schools, Hospitals, Prisons, represents an extract of a larger work she calls ‘Global Sum’. Fresh from a showing in Cairo, that work consisted of a number of grids, each containing one piece of text and eight photographs. The pictures show different environments culled from four continents that are usually places of work − some are populated by people employed there and others empty. They include office interiors, farms, schools, hospitals, military bases etc.
It soon becomes clear that there is more than meets the eye to these pictures. They are in fact documents of spaces made as constructs, copies of real work environments that have been created for the sole purpose of role-playing. You might be looking at a space constructed for the purpose of simulated warfare or a film set. The exhausted looking workers in some of the pictures are in fact construction workers, designers or members of an art department. Despite the artifice, all the images still depict a real work environment that functions within real economies and requires some form of labour. As an excerpt from Global Sum, Schools, Hospitals, Prisons selects three of the grids and puts focus on spaces that have been made for some form of sado-masochistic role-play.
These ‘dungeons’ (as they are referred to) are themed for the purpose of accommodating various fetishes and heightening any given client’s sexual gratification. The text informs us that many ‘dungeon keepers’ consider their facilities to provide more than a service, but an entry point into an alternate sexual universe of hedonistic psychodrama. This private fantasy for which the spaces were intended contrasts markedly with the unsympathetic, no-frills approach in which the spaces have been photographed − Jafri has exposed secret spaces to reveal an awkward, sometimes comic, theatricality.
Flensborggade 57, a shared exhibition and workspace in an old storefront located in the Copenhagen neighbourhood of Vesterbro, presents Maryam Jafri as part of a series of exhibitions to showcase the work of expats who are living and working in Copenhagen. In conjunction with this exhibition, the gallery will host a talk with the artist and screen Harun Farocki’s film, How to Live in the German Federal Republic (1990), on May 4 at 17:00.
Schools, Hospitals, Prisons
Flensborggade 57, Cph V; ends May 19; open Thu 12:00-17:00 and by appointment, 5249 5967; flensborggade57.squarespace.com
