Co-presented by the Masters of Visual Studies Proseminar Series and the Blackwood Gallery.

Maryam Jafri will discuss Independence Day 1934-1975. While consulting the archives of countries such as Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Senegal, and Syria, Jafri discovered that stock photo agencies such as Getty Images and Corbis have copyrighted photos that actually belong to the ministries of information of the pictured countries. This discovery motivated her to create works that pair each image from a state archive against its appropriated copy.

Their titles—Getty vs. Ghana, Corbis vs. Mozambique, Getty vs. Kenya vs. Corbis—suggest that here the conflict of copyright in our digital, networked age is yet another form of colonialism. This project exemplifies the intellectual rigour of Jafri’s operations, in which the careful framing, reframing, titling, and juxtaposition of researched materials creates and reveals new meanings.

Maryam Jafri is an artist working in video, performance and photography, with a specific interest in questioning the cultural and visual representation of history, politics and economy. Over the last years, she notably investigated the connections between the production of goods and the production of desire (Avalon, 2011); the elaboration of historical narratives through a post-colonial perspective (Siege of Khartoum, 1884, 2006); the effects of globalization on working conditions (Global Slum, 2012) or the political stakes of food networks (Mouthfeel, 2014). Informed by a research based, interdisciplinary process, her artworks are often marked by a visual language posed between film and theatre and a series of narrative experiments oscillating between script and document, fragment and whole. The Day After is her first solo exhibition in Canada.

Previous solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Basel, Bétonsalon (Paris), Gasworks (London), Bielefelder Kunstverein (Bielefeld), Galerie Nova (Zagreb), Beirut (Cairo), the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (Berlin), and Malmö Konst Museum (Malmö). Her work has also been featured extensively in international group exhibitions, including at Beirut Art Center, 21er Haus (Vienna), Institute for African Studies (Moscow) and Contemporary Image Collective (Cairo) in 2015; Camera Austria (Graz), Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), CAFAM Biennial (Beijing), Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (Miami) in 2014; Museum of Contemporary Art (Detroit), Mukha (Antwerp), and Blackwood Gallery (Mississauga) in 2013; Manifesta 9 (Genk), Shangai Biennial and Taipei Biennial (Taipei) in 2012, among others. She was an artist-in-residence at the Delfina Foundation in London in 2014, as part of the program "The Politics of Food". In 2015, she was a part of the Belgian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennial and the Götenburg Biennial. She lives and works between New York and Copenhaghen.