Maryam Jafri works across video, sculpture, photography, performance, and installation. Her practice brings sustained research into dialogue with the formal possibilities of images and objects. Archival photographs, consumer products, self-help culture, and digital labor become ways to examine how economic and political systems shape everyday experience.

In Independence Day 1934–1975 (2009–2019), Jafri assembles photographs of independence ceremonies from archives across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Repeated gestures and rituals reveal connections between events separated by geography and time. Other projects turn to the histories of consumer goods, the promises of wellness, and the relationship between work and mental health. Recent installations use pharmaceutical merchandise, computer hardware, found footage, and personal communications to bring these concerns into a shared physical space.

Jafri lives and works in Copenhagen, Oslo, and New York. She studied at Brown University and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. She is Professor of Contemporary Art at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Her solo exhibitions include presentations at Kunsthal Aarhus, Blaffer Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, TAXISPALAIS Kunsthalle Tirol, and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver.