Mamali Shafahi, Tehran and Paris
Hereditary Fountain, Velvet Dream, 2022
420x420x320cm
Flocked epoxy resin
Courtesy of Dastan Gallery
Invited by ART-O-RAMA and independent curator Arnaud Morand, artist Mamali Shafahi presents “Hereditary Fountain, Velvet Dream” – a monumental, fountain-like installation that stages a universe of hybrid, troubling reliefs and chimeric figures.
Pop inflected yet quietly menacing, the work extends Shafahi’s transgenerational dialogue with his father Reza, whose “outsider” drawings seed a bestiary that fuses Iranian myth with global, mainstream graphic aesthetics. A central female figure is encircled by bearded “watchers”; bestial faces split and double; snakes thread through eye sockets—echoes of the Iranian Zahhak legend—while columnar side elements nod to Persepolis, their capitals traded for fish to suit this aqueous setting.
The installation’s continuous circulation of reddish-pink water reads like a pulse—“blood” spilling from multiple mouths—resonating with historical and recent civic gestures in Iran when fountains were dyed red (from Iran–Iraq war memorial contexts to the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement). In Iranian—and, more broadly, Islamic—architectural and urban traditions, fountains and pools sit at the center of courtyards and squares—civic lungs that turn scarcity into presence—so the piece treats water not as décor but as a public instrument of attention. It acts as well as a subtle reference to chahār bāgh garden’s cross-channels—rivers of paradise— where water has long signified life, mercy, and order; here those motifs function as free references that Shafahi twists between heritage and fiction, recoding canonical symbols through personal mythology and contemporary unease. The result is an alluring, stylized intervention that sharpens—rather than softens—the force of its message, where the viewers to project their own stories into its surfaces.
Mamali Shafahi (b. 1982; lives and works between Paris and Tehran) is a filmmaker and visual artist known for immersive, mixed-media environments that blend sculpture, light, sound, and moving image. His practice explores how emergent technologies and intergenerational memory co-produce identity—often folding family archives and participation directly into the work (e.g., the long-term project Daddy Sperm and the docu-fiction Nature Morte, presented as an installation at City Princes/ses, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2019). His VR collaboration with Ali Eslami, nerd_funk, has been shown at Het Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam), the Vancouver Biennale, and IDFA, and received the Golden Calf for Best Interactive Film at the Netherlands Film Festival; he later joined the Rijksakademie (Amsterdam) and, in 2024, began a collaboration with Domenico Gutknecht titled Rest in Peace.
