Melika Shafahi
Lapin - Tavsan -Rabbit - Khargoush, 2012, 3'2
Rabbit is a self-portrait in the form of four videos that show simple everyday actions related to the five senses, such as eating, touching, looking and listening. The young Turkish woman questions feminity in contemporary art. It manifests an emic perspective of the khaliji minority communities that mirrors Melika’s own life as a migrant in marseille. The background music ye mosht sarbaz (a bunch of soldiers) a classic rapfa masterpiece by Hichkas (nobody) also provides a very smart metaphorical layer to the entire discourse.
Born in 1984 in Tehran, Iran, lives between Tehran and Paris
Bachelor in photography, Art University, Tehran, 2007
Bachelor, School of Fine Arts, Montpellier, 2010
Master, School of Fine Arts, Lyon, 2012
Like the rest of her generation born after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Melika Shafahi grew up negotiating the paradoxes of contemporary Iranian life: the influence of American consumer culture versus the austere religiosity of the state; the divisions between public and private spheres.
For her photos she often works by creating and colorful almost theatrical stagings that reflect her own hybridity, combining the light and composition typical of Renaissance painting with Eastern visual references. In her recent work, she explores globalized social culture, an aesthetic that itself blurs the boundaries between artifice and reality, fact and fiction.