Copenhagen-based artist Maryam Jafri’s practice broadly encompasses video, sculpture, photography, and installation, with research remaining an essential element of her work. STIR spoke to the artist about two solo exhibitions at Kai Matsumiya in New York: one showcasing her 10-year project Independence Day 1934-1975, which ended this past February, and another on mental health and labour which opens early April.

In 2006, Jafri was researching a film project in the archives of Ghana’s Ministry of Information when she caught sight of a single folder labelled “Independence Day”. Inside were images from March 6, 1957, the day Ghana gained independence from the United Kingdom, the first of the Sub-Saharan nations to do so. The photographs captured the orderly proceedings between British officials and the independent nation’s first prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah, as they unfolded during the day. "They interested me because they were familiar: with this language of diplomacy which dictates how a nationally historic moment is performed. But they were also somehow distant, estranged, displaced. It was a Western form that had been grafted on,” Jafri tells STIR.

In 2009 the artist began what would become Independence Day 1934-1975, an installation of 57 archival photographs from Asian, African, and Middle Eastern Independence Day ceremonies. An expanded version was also published in the 2019 artist’s book Maryam Jafri: Independence Days, which contained 234 photographs. “I started thinking about how the independence day of each country is always singular. It's always meant to be iconic. What happens if you do a typology, a comparative visual analysis and you juxtapose several independence days?” asks Jafri.

Travelling to over 30 official public archives worldwide, Jafri found that the images held within each Independence Day archive followed a similar script, rarely deviating from a mixture of bureaucracy and theatricality including the signing of an independence agreement to parade celebrations. In these images, the artist recognised the unspoken violence lurking beneath the stiff and supervised diplomacy on view. “At the moment of the colonial power’s obsolescence, you see it exerting its power much more fully,” she tells STIR. “You see the power in its ability to codify independence into ritual and bureaucracy, therefore completely negating all of the violence: the people they put in jail, tortured, or killed. None of it is acknowledged. Instead, there is only the shaking of hands. I found it almost frightening,” she adds.

Independence Day 1934-1975 includes a printed map and key to the images on view, numbering their placement on the wall and indicating their categories, from “negotiations” to “address to the nation.” Jafri has also meticulously listed the archives from which they were sourced. For the artist, each image needed to originate in the country it depicts, rather than online archives such as Getty Images or the British Library. Jafri explains, “Not because I think they are more true, but I wanted to give visibility to these archives, many of which only exist offline. I was interested in their precarity.” It was not always possible to visit the countries herself, and Jafri sometimes faced difficulty accessing archives without any institutional affiliation. She often hired local historians and documentarians to help locate Independence Day archives and facilitate the acquisition of images.

When Jafri began comparing her research with online resources in 2012, she found copies of images she’d collected that had been copyrighted by Getty. Struck by the discrepancies of information and dates in captions, image manipulation and the ubiquitous use of Getty versions in newspapers and online blogs as many countries celebrated their 50-year independence anniversaries between 2007 and 2015, Jafri created Getty vs. Ghana. The piece juxtaposed two identical images depicting the 1957 Ghanaian Independence ceremony, one from the Ghana Ministry of Information and the other from Getty, highlighting the coexistence of duplicates from separate sources. “There’s the whole discussion about restitution of cultural heritage in museums, normally with statues or artefacts. Getty vs. Ghana is looking at some of that digitisation of cultural patrimony, as well as where the slippages happen between different historical sources in captions,” she tells STIR.

Jafri finished Independence Day 1934-1975 in 2019 after collecting nearly 500 images. “10 years was a nice round number. I told myself it was time for a book. By definition, it’s not meant to be exhaustive. I couldn’t visit every country and it’s not a project I wanted to build failure into. By 2019, I felt there was enough, and that compiling them into a book would be the ending point. I felt that including 54 images in the installation was about the maximum for an exhibition,” she says.

When arranging the photographs, Jafri found that certain categories emerged naturally from the images she had collected, lending to the artist’s decision to organise them in clusters and draw attention to the fixed nature of the ceremonies prescribed by the former colonial powers. In the exhibition Independence Day, 1934-1975 at Kai Matsumiya, the arrangement resembled a storyboard. Read left to right, they began with a “prologue” of protest images and ended with addresses to the nation. “I didn't want to arrange them in a classic serial grid. The images themselves have an element of time in them, not just in terms of history, but a flow from morning to evening. It's an event that takes place and unfolds in time,” Jafri explains.

Jafri will open another solo exhibition at Kai Matsuyima in April, titled Lithium Balance, showcasing a range of mixed media objects and video work that expand upon the topics of health, labour and economics that the artist has explored in her previous work. Inspired by the dual connotations of lithium carbonate in psychopharmacology and the renewable energy industry, Lithium Balance examines collective crises through the prism of individual experience in mental health and labour. “It’s different from Independence Day in that it's more rooted in contemporary conditions, and it doesn’t use the formalised, classic, almost academic way of researching,” says Jafri. “It is research in the sense that I’m accumulating information that you can access online, from scientific peer-review papers to self-help articles from Mayo Clinic. But this is much more idiosyncratic. I’m also trying to bring in my own intuitive and emotional weight to the process and the work.”