Maryam Jafri
Solo exhibition: nonstop you
April 10th – June 2nd
Opening reception: Sunday, April 10th (6-8pm)

Kai Matsumiya presents nonstop you, Maryam Jafri’s second solo exhibition at the 153 ½ Stanton Street space. It will also be the last exhibition at the space before we relocate to Chinatown which will debut this September.

Information Packet
Selected Press

The title of the exhibition originates from a now-defunct Lufthansa Airlines integrated advertising campaign. nonstop you is structured in three series of works exploring the increasing prevalence of self-branding advertisement campaigns; Everyday Model, Home Office, and Hi Maryam. These advertisements flesh out the increasing unsustainability of the self within our everyday lives as de-facto consumerist targets, particularly and especially from the pharmaceutical industry. Amid raging precarity, everyone is an entrepreneur of the self, and has something to confess and someone to attack or defend against, at least potentially. 

It could be said that jobs define our social identities. Home Office ft. Angola, Iraq, Vietnam, Vicodin consists of a workstation comprising a computer playing the looped video Angola, Iraq, Vietnam, Vicodin, and laid out with pharmaceutically-branded office supplies like a stapler, tape dispenser, envelope opener, pens, and so on featuring logos of bestselling medications, many of them used to treat the so-called “diseases of affluence”, a term used to describe the rise of chronic diseases associated with economic development, particularly in developing world countries, such as ADHD, diabetes, depression, and heart disease. The video features tv and online ads from the Global South, including military commercials, beer commercials, home mortgage loans, presidential candidates, tissue advertisements, interspersed with viral clips of real life violent office rage episodes, Ronald Reagan recounting a joke about Soviet Tyranny, and a young Steve Jobs opining about the world to come. Visitors are encouraged to comfortably sit down, put on the headphones, and watch the video.  

The Everyday Model, a photograph and text-based work, centers on the phenomena of “ordinary looking” people who model for everyday consumer items. Multiple print advertisements feature the same model, often for competing or complementary products with confessional taglines as if sourced from everyday people. For example, “Fit style into your life” features a the ordinary model hugging her daughter in a jeans advertisement. This is juxtaposed with “Schoolwork that matches his intelligence” where the same model hugs her son for an advertisement about alleviating Attention Deficit Disorder with amphetamines. Beneath is a framed text, written by Jafri, part of which reads: “ Twice as many boys are diagnosed with ADHD as girls. Studies reveal that boys veer on the hyperactivity end of the disorder whereas girls on the attention deficit end. Teenage girls with undiagnosed ADHD are at high risk of developing eating disorders and engaging in self-harm behavior such as cutting...“ 

Reflecting on Everyday Model, Jafri writes: “ In their anticipation of emerging forms of subjectivity, one that is no longer just performative but also branded, these images look, Janus-like, back to the era of mass media and forward to the rise of social media… If confession first arose in a religious context, and later emerged as a psychoanalytic tool, now confession is a branding tool. “

Hi Maryam, presented as a standalone video work in the back of the gallery, exemplifies the rise of customization and one-to-one marketing–the delivery of a unique product or service to a single individual. Whereas it could be said that Everyday Model and Home Office focus on the mundane, Hi Maryam is just for you, the nonstop you, for any occasion, whether it is real or sourced from our darkest fantasies.