Maryam Jafri: I Drank the Kool-Aid But I Didn’t Inhale

Maryam Jafri’s work is informed by a research based, interdisciplinary process, often marked by a series of narrative experiments sitting at the crossroads of cultural anthropology and conceptual art. Product Recall: An Index of Innovation (2014–15) combines framed texts and “still life” product photography of unsuccessful food products from the private archives of anonymous food industry figures. This alternative cultural history of industrialized food production in the 20th century reveals how agribusiness and the innovations of laboratory science are implicated in the mass circulation and consumption of everyday commodities.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.