Maryam Jafri on Desire, Labour, and Allegory in Film and Photography

In a 2014 conversation with Marina Vishmidt for Afterall, artist Maryam Jafri discusses her practice across film, installation, and photography, focusing on works such as 'Avalon' (2011), 'Siege of Khartoum, 1884' (2006), 'Costume Party' (2005), and 'Running' (2000). Jafri explains how 'Avalon' stages the manufacture of S&M equipment by women workers in an unnamed Asian country, using formal restraint to depict desire as neither blocked nor free. The film is based on anonymous documentary footage and interviews, contrasting with the photo-collage 'Siege of Khartoum, 1884', which juxtaposes contemporary Iraq War images with archival newspaper texts on earlier imperial interventions. Jafri cites Deleuze and Guattari's concept of desire as historically and politically shaped, and critiques art-world discussions of labour for under-articulating desire. She notes that material labour underpins immaterial labour, with factories and truck drivers outnumbering computer programmers in the US. Her upcoming work 'Mouthfeel' (2014) focuses on Big Food, drawing from 19th-century realist drama and US sitcoms, exploring how wartime food strategies became peacetime lifestyles. Jafri's first solo exhibition in London, 'Mouthfeel', opened at Gasworks, featuring the short film and a photo-text work 'Product Recall: An Index of Innovation', running until 18 May 2014.