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Maryam Monalisa Gharavi

is an artist, poet, and cultural technologist whose work explores the interplay between aesthetic and political valences in the public domain. Solo/group exhibitions, performances, and expanded publications include Nottingham Contemporary, Pioneer Works, Parasol Unit, Serpentine Cinema, Framer Framed, Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Art Dubai, New Museum, Pacific Film Archive, Sonic Acts, Triple Canopy, Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, The Poetry Project, Women and Performance, The White Review, Art in America, The Literary Review, Asymptote, Circumference, Brooklyn Public Library, among others. She has served as artist-in-residence at Trélex Poetry Residency (France), Sonic Acts (Netherlands), Residency Unlimited (U.S.A.), Wysing Arts Centre (U.K), Industry Lab (U.S.A.), Delfina Foundation (U.K.), Darat al Funun (Jordan), among others. She completed a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Film & Visual Studies at Harvard University and an M.F.A. in Film/Video at Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, and held a postdoctoral Fulbright and Visiting Professorship at Birzeit University. She was a Lecturer at New York University and Northeastern University from 2019 to 2021; at Harvard University from 2012 to 2017; and has served as visiting faculty/studio artist at Valand Academy, Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University, Bard Microcollege, among others. Book publications include a translation of Waly Salomão’s Algaravias: Echo Chamber (Ugly Duckling Presse), nominated for a PEN Award for Poetry in Translation; The Distancing Effect (BlazeVOX); and Bio (Inventory Press). Artist books include Apparent Horizon 2 (Bonington Gallery); Alphabet of an Unknown City (Belladonna*), Secret Catalan Poem (The Elephants), Mohammad Wikipedia Book (Recess), Dictionary of Night, co-authored with Mirene Arsanios (Ashkal Alwan), and Oil News 1989-2020, co-authored with Sam Lavigne (Sonic Acts). Her translation of Salomão’s Border Fare is forthcoming in 2024 (World Poetry Books). She is Editor Emeritus of The New Inquiry, where she previously served as Editor-at-Large. She founded South/South, cited as "one to watch" by the Los Angeles Times, and authored 500+ posts independently between 2009-2012 and at TNI between 2012-2023. She is the founder and principal of Oil Research Group (ORG), a one-woman collective exploring coterminous oil and data environments at the heart of "data is the new oil." ORG regularly collaborates with artists, scientists, economists, indigenous environmentalists, and host art institutions. She lives and works in New York.

South/South

Ramadan Diaries: Many Eids

By Maryam Monalisa GharaviApril 30, 2023
Ramadan makes me feel like I'm living inside a Rolling Stones song. It doesn't matter which one
South/South

Ramadan Diaries: Where's the Information?

By Maryam Monalisa GharaviApril 23, 2023
There will be no American garbage uprising
South/South

Ramadan Diaries: Heroes & Orphans

By Maryam Monalisa GharaviApril 15, 2023
In feeling so othered, so alien, so alone and for so long, the orphan develops a taste for otherness itself. To be so truly unbelonged anywhere one has to create a self that belongs everywhere.
South/South

Ramadan Diaries: Looking Backward, Looking Inward

By Maryam Monalisa GharaviApril 4, 2023
I felt the pull of a huge shift, a vortex swallowing a former shriveled identity and leaving me with the terror of choice, a new path.
South/South

Ramadan Diaries: Personification

By Maryam Monalisa GharaviMay 15, 2021
A national gas-lighting project. That we didn’t see what we saw with our own eyes.
South/South

Ramadan Diaries: Reprieve

By Maryam Monalisa GharaviMay 15, 2021
My greatest resentment is how little they prepare you for becoming a woman
South/South

Ramadan Diaries: Dissimulation

By Maryam Monalisa GharaviMay 11, 2021
This is how you demobilize a cause: by framing ethical boundaries as negotiations
South/South

Ramadan Diaries: Analysis

By Maryam Monalisa GharaviMay 5, 2021
"You promised me not to break your promise anymore, it is I, dear, who have caused this break." —"All of Asia is indefinitely on hold."
South/South

Ramadan Diaries, Day Thirty-One

By Maryam Monalisa GharaviJune 30, 2019
We can’t seem to grasp the patience it takes for a tree to grow
South/South

Ramadan Diaries, Day Twenty-Nine

By Maryam Monalisa GharaviJune 20, 2019
She is the kind of person who understands that nothing that can flow needs to be forced
South/South

Ramadan Diaries, Day Twenty-Seven

By Maryam Monalisa GharaviJune 14, 2019
The battle over email is one over which I hold a false sense of equilibrium
South/South

Ramadan Diaries, Day Twenty-Five

By Maryam Monalisa GharaviJune 11, 2019
I am the algorithm's targeted audience for work-mode motivational posters
South/South

Secret Catalan Poem is Out

By Maryam Monalisa GharaviJune 6, 2019
From enactment to multi-authored text to translation to public performance to published volume
South/South

Ramadan Diaries, Day Twenty-Three

By Maryam Monalisa GharaviJune 6, 2019
Withholding certain things from entering your body and mind and in doing so creating psychic real estate
South/South

Ramadan Diaries, Day Twenty

By Maryam Monalisa GharaviJune 3, 2019
Hunger can feel like a prolonged period of waiting, thirst feels like giving up
South/South

Ramadan Diaries, Day Eighteen

By Maryam Monalisa GharaviMay 31, 2019
No subject should be too low for a painting or a poem

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