Shalalae Jamil

Bio
Shalalae Jamil was born in Karachi, Pakistan in 1978. Educated at Bennington College (BFA, 2001) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, (MFA, 2006) she has since taught, exhibited, and curated work in Pakistan, the U.S., and the U.K. Using photography, video, installation, and elements of performance, her works target home as a region consumed by the collisions between religion, tradition, and modernity. In 2009, she has shown work at the Kara Film Festival, Greynoise, and Woman Made Gallery. Her work is in private collections in India, Pakistan, and the U.S. Currently the artist lives and works between Karachi and New York.

Artist Statement
Shalalae Jamil’s images are saturated with the intimate moments and underlying codes of
family life. Shot in interior spaces in which private dramas get played out, they simultaneously expand and subvert the informal, content-driven aesthetic of the snapshot.

Her work and her life are locked together, creating an organic, evolving, non-linear oeuvre that readily lends itself to the mix-and-match game of curating.

I Got the Power 1 & 2 come out of such a process, juxtaposing mundane and contentious images of contemporary life in the context of Pakistan and the South Asian diaspora. The works rely on associations made as a result of the sensuous immediacy and proximity of each image to the next. Avoiding a clear-cut narrative, they have much to say about changing relationships: between photographer and subject, self and the body, power and passivity.

Work Details:
I Got the Power–2
Triptych
Digital print
Dimensions variable (up to 60″ x 30″)
2009