Mamali Shafahi | "Birth": Dastan:Outside [Focus Room 04]

Dastan:Outside presents "Birth", a solo exhibition by Mamali Shafahi. [Focus Room 04] takes place near Dastan’s Basement on West Maryam Street, after Raz Alley. The exhibition opens on Friday, August 21, 2026, and remains on view through September 11.

In “Birth,” ending and beginning are not treated as separate states, but as two sides of a continuous movement. The exhibition extends the trajectory that Mamali Shafahi and Domenico Gutknecht have traced through absence, passage, and imagined afterlives, returning this journey to its point of origin: a beginning. The works unfold through fragments—a gesture, a touch, an animal, a landscape, or an echo of desire and fear—detached from chronological time and placed alongside one another, as if different moments of a life had been gathered within the same body. Like memory, the works reconstruct life not as a continuous narrative but as a collection of scattered intensities: fragments of the past that remain present within a new state. This logic extends into the spatial construction of the exhibition. Red spreads from the surfaces of the works to the curtains, windows, and floor of the gallery, transforming the space into an immersive, almost bodily interior. Emerging among the folds of red fabric, the works occupy a space somewhere between a room, a stage, and a body, appearing as traces surfacing through a shared skin and momentarily holding together fragments of different times and lives. The gallery becomes both an interior and a threshold—a place one enters as if returning to somewhere before the formation of memory. “Birth” completes the circle without reaching a definitive end. What began as a meditation on disappearance returns as an act of becoming.

Mamali Shafahi (b. 1982, Tehran) studied at the University of Art, Tehran, and ENSAPC (École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts Paris-Cergy). His works are held in collections including The Caudwell Collection (London), Zuzeum Art Centre (Latvia), OMM Museum Collection (Eskisehir), and Die Mobiliar Collection (Switzerland). His work has been presented at international art fairs including LISTE (Basel, 2021). His solo exhibitions include Daddy (Tongue Remix) (Zaal Art Gallery, Toronto, 2024); Phantasmagoria: Daddy Kills More People (The Breeder Gallery, Athens, 2023); Deep Throats: How Deep Is Your Love? (Vitrine Gallery, London, 2022); Judgment Night: Daddy Kills People (Parallel Circuit, Tehran, 2022); The Underworld and its Emergent Effects (Dastan’s Basement, Tehran, 2016); and Broken SD (Dastan’s Basement, Tehran, 2014). In 2021, Shafahi was a finalist for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize, and in 2020 he received the Golden Calf Award for Best Interactive Film at the Netherlands Film Festival.