Mamali Shafahi’s life and work are deeply intertwined in a tale of magic, myths, and the endless blur between reality and illusion. Raised in war-torn Iran, Shafahi’s journey as an artist began amidst the chaos of constant relocation and the complexities of life under a regime that demanded conformity. In this setting, where creativity felt like rebellion, he nurtured his passion for exploring the liminal space between dreams and reality. From nomadic childhoods to living on the fringes of technology, Shafahi’s art weaves together the myths of his Persian heritage with today’s cutting-edge technologies. His is a story of personal transformation, artistic rebellion, and collaboration across generations, particularly with his father—creating a body of work that challenges us to question what is real and what lies beyond our perception. But what happens when a wanderer, always in flux, begins to settle into the spaces between fantasy and truth? Shafahi’s story beckons us to explore these blurred lines.

Installation at Garage Museum, Rotterdam, 2023 Photo: Courtesy of the Artist

I would like to know about your early life in Tehran. At what point did you decide to migrate, and how was that decision made?

I was one of a whole generation of Iranian youth that grew up during the Iran-Iraq war, a thirsty generation, greedily trying, after the war, to catch up with what came flooding in through a newly opened door: tons of new stuff arriving from abroad. In my case, cinema and music videos were the keys. When I was seven, my family moved to Tehran from Saveh (a small city near Tehran), and since then, we have lived almost like nomads. I remember my mom said once we changed apartments 16 times in 25 years. When you grow up in Iran, you grow up knowing more or less how to live with the regime, but it can be tough sometimes. I was top of the class at school, for example, but they actually announced to everybody on prize day that I wouldn’t get a prize because I wasn’t pious enough. Imagine that for a kid. I started studying photography and video in Tehran, did some film journalism, and had my first solo show of photos… But of course, I really wanted to be able to create in a freer atmosphere, so I learned a bit of French, bluffed my way into a French art school, and moved to France with hardly a penny in my pockets when I was 23 years old. I was always ready to move. Even now, with my partner, we live a nomadic existence between different European cities and the Californian desert, never in one place for long.

“Kosmos/Phantasmogoria”, collaboration with Pensive Vivifier, 2024 Photo: Courtesy of the Artist

You collaborated with Pensive on a project titled ‘Kosmose,’ where your contribution was the border between illusion, horror, and fantasy. What is the border shared between illusion, reality, and fantasy?

Yes, I invited “Kosmos,” a Pensive Vivifier audio-visual performance project, to a Freaky Dancing1 event in Utrecht, Netherlands, and with the help of my friends Kookshol and Ali Pirzadeh, made costumes for the show. The theme came from my last exhibition at The Breeder in Athens, Phantasmagoria: Daddy Kills More people2.

For a long time now, as I’ve been looking at how new technologies are transforming everything we know at a fast pace, I’ve been interested in that borderline. With technologies emerging now and the AI boom, it’s getting even less clear: what’s real, virtual, or fake? Human or machine? Or a bit of both? In my recent work, under the influence of my dad’s work, with the references he gets from traditional Persian culture and mythology, I’ve enjoyed playing with that ambiguous borderline between dreams (or nightmares) and reality. I’ve been combining globally recognizable symbols and icons, such as gorillas, snakes, scorpions, and candles… in composite works – fantastical, human, animal – that I install in UV-lit spaces to create situations that are puzzling, scary, violent, and playful all at the same time. A bit in the spirit of the cartoon horror or violence we all enjoyed in our childhood. I hope visiting people will invent their own stories, make up their dreams, and alter their realities. The key thing for me is to bring back some of the ancient magic that, scrolling through our smartphones, we’ve lost.

Reza Shafahi, “Prince.sse.s des villes” exhibition, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2019 Photo: Courtesy of the artist

Collaboration with your father has been an important element in your recent work. Can you tell us more?

Yes, it’s been a long story, but I’ll keep it short. When I was a kid, my dad, Reza Shafahi, was sometimes a shadowy figure in our lives (I have three sisters), and sometimes we were brought up by our mum on her own. Dad’s a quiet, reserved man and was a wrestler and trainer, but mad about cards and gambling, so he sometimes had to go off into hiding to escape his debts. About twelve years ago, when I was fascinated by identity and how we end up being who we are, I decided to ask my dad to start drawing to see if I could see any ‘genetic’ link between his drawings and my own. Of course, I couldn’t have imagined it then, but this would transform our lives. Dad’s drawings, once he got ‘hooked,’ turned out to be good: colorful, sexy, playful, enigmatic… They revealed things about his imagination, an inner life we had no idea about before, and his typically Iranian love of Persian mythology and poetry. The family started posting them on Instagram, and some well-known art-world figures, especially in the US, like Jerry Saltz, Michael Bullock, Tony Cox, and Martha Kirszenbaum, started taking an interest and reposting. From there on, the thing snowballed.

Dad was very soon in group shows and featured in the New York Times, then solo shows in Berlin, Tehran, and Copenhagen… I envied his work for its freshness, freedom, and joy. As it represented a link between me, my life, and my Persian heritage, I started involving my mum and dad in my work. They were the stars of my film Nature Morte, and the film was at the heart of a big installation, Daddy Sperm, which I designed for a big show curated by Hugo Vitrani and Fabien Danesi Palais de Tokyo in 2013. So imagine, my parents, living quietly in retirement in the Tehran suburbs, found themselves surrounded by thousands of people, and all their family reunited at the opening in Paris, stars of the show in a way. Since the Palais de Tokyo, in a kind of extra twist to the story, my dad’s paintings have had a strong influence on my own work, in series like Heirloom Velvet and the ones that followed, and in installations in places like Tehran Antwerp, Paris and Athens, and the monumental fountain I installed in the courtyard of 35-37 in Paris last year.

”Hereditary fountain/Velvet dream”, 3537, Paris, 2023 Photo: Courtesy of the Artist

In the Daddy Sperm project, you show the miracle of life that grows out of a drop of fluid. What personal traits have you found that are shared between you and one or more members of your immediate family that, no matter how hard you try to change, you can’t? Something that is embedded in your genes.

You can safely say Iran has a ‘high-context’ culture where families are closely knit. I’m very close to my parents and sisters, and as usual in families, we all look more or less like mum or dad or each other, and while we each have our individual personalities and talents, we share some traits. I’m especially close to Melika, my youngest sister. She’s an artist too, a photographer mostly, and we have the same wild side, a kind of blind fearlessness in what we do that sometimes gets us into trouble. But I wonder if that comes from Mum, Dad, or a generation before. When I really got into Daddy Sperm, it became an investigation of how parents shape their children and then how children go on to transform their parents in turn. And I took the idea further, deliberately transforming my parents into film actors, putting them in weirder and weirder, dreamlike situations in my film Nature Morte, until they were digital characters, infinitely multiplied at the end. Then my dad became an artist in his own right, showing and selling work, so that was another transformation. And now, the impact of his work has transformed mine. This has actually, I think, brought to the fore and strengthened the links between us all in the family. My new works have illustrated what I think is probably the one indelible trait that really links us all, our Persian heritage – not just the obvious, seductive, picturesque side of Persian culture and the omnipresence in our lives of the Persian poets, but deep, dark undercurrents running back to myths and legends, with their roots in our shared unconscious.

Movie still from “Nature Morte”, 2015-2017 Photo: Courtesy of the Artist

The titles of your works and shows are provocative and imaginative. You were even kicked out of school for performances perceived as somewhat anarchist. You’ve stated you couldn’t see it back then. What allowed you to realize it afterward? Looking back, were they right to kick you out?

When I first left Iran for France, I guess you might say I kind of exploded creatively. I focused on taboo and breaking taboos as one of my main themes at the time – that and the Andy Warhol idea that everybody needs their fifteen minutes of fame, a show. I was usually naked in my performances, covered in glitter, and for one of them, I actually went, out of curiosity, to do a porn studio screen test that I showed on a TV behind me during an open day at my school in France. The school eventually thought – and this was a total surprise to me, as till then, I felt the faculty was committed to cutting-edge work – I’d gone one taboo too far. They banned me from performance classes, kept the videos, and refused to give me a diploma. I still see this as an abuse of power and an example of what’s wrong in power relations within the art school system, and still plan to make a film about it – so no, I don’t think they were right.

Frans Hals Museum Photo: Courtesy of the Artist

Is there an ultimate reality? Is there an optimum reality within your perceptions?

I don’t know how we can tell anymore. I grew up under such a strict regime in Iran that, as I said before, everything became ambiguous and coded, with an apparent meaning and an actual one you had to dig out for yourself. Then, as you know, I’ve really been fascinated how emerging technologies are blurring the lines between what’s real and what isn’t, and have played with that a lot. In my early videos and then in my film “Nature Morte“, I took my parents, normally living a quiet life in retirement near Tehran, turned them into digital characters, and transported them into a dream world as far from their everyday reality as possible. In my big VR project with Ali Eslami, nerd_funk, we really dig into issues like how technology will allow us to extend our bodies and our mental and physical capacities, how in a future, ‘post-body’ world, we might even upload our mind to an artificial body, and live in it forever. Like Benjamin Bratton, we will be asking, is this a person or a machine? Is there a person behind this machine? And if so, how much is a person? It’s fascinating and irresistible but kind of repulsive and horrifying at the same time, but that, if anything, is our future reality.

Heirloom velvet series, Portal Photo: Courtesy of the Artist

Can you tell me about your friend David Caille and his influence on you?

This could be another long story… David was a brilliant and charismatic young painter who took his own life ten years ago when he was 27. I think we lost, in that personal tragedy, somebody who really had the potential to bring something new and fresh to figurative painting. Even now, the strength of the work he left behind has an immediate impact on people, and we’ve tried – his friends and family, people who believed that potential should be remembered – to keep his work alive. There was an exhibition of most of what remained (David tended just to leave his work behind him wherever he’d been, so a lot is now lost) at Treize in Paris in 2015. Since then, we’ve done our best to keep his memory alive, and he’s been shown at Sultana in Paris and the MOCO Contemporary Art Museum in Montpellier, France.

“Jesus” by David Caille, 2013 30x40cm, OIl on canvas Photo: Courtesy of the Artist

I met David at the Beaux Arts in Limoges, so way back in my first year in France, where it was obvious to us all that he was exceptionally talented – Peter Doig said after David died, he was one of his most interesting and talented students and still talked-about at the Kunstakademie. But in those days, we were very young and totally broke, rummaging through the trash behind burger restaurants for unsold burgers… We went to museums together, talked endlessly about art, shared our love and hate, and obviously influenced each other. David helped me understand Western painting, especially the French schools, comparing them with the Germans and others. He was obsessed with the post-impressionists, but also Klee, Hockney… He inspired me a lot. When David went to Düsseldorf, I went with him, and later, we shared a studio in Paris – David actually lived in it, too poor to do anything else – painted side-by-side and did some work together on ceramics. I was in Tehran when he died. Of course, like everybody who knew him, I was devastated. I’ve never got over it. But as I said, as we all truly believe David was unique, we’ve done our best to keep his flame alive; he’s always in my mind and, especially recently, has definitely influenced my work. I’m hoping, now, to get some of his paintings shown in New York, with mine and my dad’s.

Rest in peace” series, collaboration with Domenico Gutknecht, 2024 112x62x8cm, Oil pastel on canvas, flocked epoxy clay Photo: Courtesy of the Artist

I understand you are getting back to painting, can you tell us a little bit about it?

Yes, and I think this is directly related, at least in part, to my love and respect for David. He was a born painter. He did some sculptures here and there, all of them now lost, but really, his life – apart from sport, he loved biking, skiing, and hiking – was all paint. I think that’s why, since he died, I haven’t touched painting at all. I didn’t feel strong enough to step on his territory, and anyway, my own interests veered off in the direction of 3D video and film and new technologies, and then there were the collaborations with my dad and his influence on me… But this year was the tenth anniversary of David’s suicide, and of course, I was very strongly aware of that, and started to feel as if David was really still a presence in my life – I mean, it might sound weird, but like a benevolent spirit, keeping an eye on me and guiding me.

“Rest in peace” series, collaboration with Domenico Gutknecht, 2024 91x86x17cm, Oil pastel on canvas, flocked epoxy clay. Photo: Courtesy of the Artist

You know what the art world’s like. I spent the last 25 years, at first just struggling to keep my head above water, and then dashing from city to city, fair to fair, opening to opening, party to party, for me and to promote my dad as well… as well as actually getting my work done, doing the research, communicating about it and so on… With the tenth anniversary of David’s death in my mind, after years of all that, suddenly, I needed to get away and take stock. I retreated with my partner to the Californian desert, and there, with David looking over our shoulders, we started work on Rest in Peace, and suddenly, alone with Domenico, in the desert, definitely under David’s ‘eye,’ I found myself painting again. For us, the idea of ‘rest in peace’ works both ways: not just a wish from us, in the present, to the past, but a benevolent message to us from the past: you’re OK, we’re with you. The series sums up all of my career to date. Like a lot of my work, for example with David and later my parents, it’s collaborative, this time with Domenico. Like most of my projects in recent years, it aims to build bridges in the present between our uncertain, techno-centric future and the distant, subconscious past. In form, it brings together various strands of my practice so far, with my dad’s influence, especially the ‘witness’ figures watching us in the first pictures, David’s influence in this return to painting and pastel, and the artists evoked, Western and Persian, the flocked reliefs and sculptures that frame them… After years of tech focus, these are the most traditional-looking, nostalgic works I’ve ever done.

2020 Flocked Epoxy Clay Photo: Courtesy of Sanpat Collection

What is your next project like, what are you working on?

You might have noticed I still describe myself first as a filmmaker before I say, artist. My next project is another film, one I see as the third in a triptych. The first was Nature Morte, featuring and transforming my parents. That was the core of the Daddy Sperm installation at the Palais de Tokyo. The second, finished last year, is called Joachim: A Baby Fluxus, and it’s about a hugely colorful but enigmatic character, a multifaceted, multi-tasking artist-polymath living in Vancouver. The third… Well, I’ll talk about that in a minute. These films are all hybrid portraits, a mashup of my own reality with the subjects to create a new, third, hybrid persona, one that’s neither of us precisely. There are no longer any boundaries between the depicted character’s real life and persona, as documented in the film, and my ‘use’ of them as an actor. They are part documentary, part art film, switching between factual, realistic episodes like interviews, conversations, slices of life, archive material… and pure sound-and-image episodes, which may involve video collages and 3D images inspired by video art and music videos.

My new film will be called The Sharok: Golpesar. Sharok is a famous gay porn star of Persian origin based in Los Angeles, and he has over 100,000 followers on Instagram. I got to know him not through pornography but through art. He went to see my sisters’ photography when it was shown in Los Angeles, and then in Paris, he came to the opening of my first solo exhibition at the Galerie Mitterrand. We hit it off immediately as if we already knew each other. Knowing he was famous for porn, I was intrigued to discover somebody warm, quiet-spoken, charismatic but humble… Not at all what you might expect.

“nerd_funk”, VR installation, Rijksakademie Openstudio, 2022 Photo: Courtesy of the Artist

As we became friends and I got to know more about his life, I realized that a film portrait of Sharok could speak to a number of contemporary issues in a coherent, meaningful way. Focusing intimately on his background, his tough and sometimes violent life story, his work – not only as an adult-movie actor but also as a pushback in drag – his private interests, socio-political activism, artistic activities, and off-screen personality… It will be an ‘Archimboldo’ portrait. It will deconstruct the most obvious stereotypes about sex workers but also explore issues like exile, migration, and diaspora life in a new and often hostile culture. As well as the identity, gender, sexual orientation, and exploitation in the porn industry, it will look at the ‘escape’ strategies Sharok has used – painting, film and photography, animals, birds, and nature to construct and protect his private life. He’s a porn star, an ex-drag queen, and now an online activist, but his ‘impossible dream’ is still one day to move to Iran, buy land and raise pigeons in his origins. I’ve mapped all this out and am now working with a production company to find the financing – the worst part about making videos, VR, and films!

Also, Ali Eslami and I have an agreement to show the full five chapters of our VR-centred project, nerd_funk, in a new configuration at MU in Eindhoven, in the Netherlands. And I’ve been invited to install a solo booth presentation at the ARCO fair in Madrid next spring, so I’m really excited about that. 

What would the Fable of Mamali Shafahi say/be about/tell?

My fable would be a typical ‘wanderer’s’ tale, full of magic, myths, illusions, adventures, challenges, joys, risks, and fantasies, like life itself.

In the ever-changing landscapes of Mamali Shafahi’s life and work, one thing remains constant: the pursuit of meaning in the spaces where reality and illusion merge. Whether through his collaborative projects with his father or his technological forays into virtual realms, Shafahi invites us to reconsider the ways we interact with the world, both real and imagined. His life as a wanderer, shaped by displacement and the search for freedom, is reflected in every layer of his work. As technology transforms how we perceive the world, Mamali’s art reminds us to hold onto the ancient magic that connects us to our deepest selves, even as we traverse unfamiliar territories. His fable reflects life itself—a journey full of risks, joys, challenges, and dreams, where the borders between truth and fantasy are as fluid as the artist who navigates them.