Maryam Monalisa Gharavi is an artist, poet, and theorist. Her work in film, video, performance, text, photography, drawing, and sound explores the interplay between aesthetic and political valences in the public domain. Bio is a hybrid work that reconfigures canceled text and the World Wide Web. It captures a span of 365 days during which the artist updated the 160-character “bio” section of her Twitter account each day. While tweets are regularly captured by corporate data storage centers this “bio” section remains the only untraceable and non-archived part of the software’s superstructure.

Bio, immersively created via a proprietary app, ultimately left no record of itself, complicating the normative binaries of online/offline and digital/print. An experiment in erasure, self-deletion, and visibility in the expanded sphere of the net, Bio anchors itself in the wider lineage of artists’ canceled texts, but in the age of new data as “soft” power.

Gharavi has exhibited or participated in residencies or projects at Townhouse Gallery, MFA Boston, Pacific Film Archive, Triple Canopy, Pioneer Works, Serpentine Cinema, New Museum, Delfina Foundation, Nottingham Contemporary, among others. Recent publications include a translation of Waly Salomão’s Algaravias: Echo Chamber (Ugly Duckling Presse), The Distancing Effect (BlazeVOX), and Apparent Horizon 2 (Bonington Gallery). She completed an M.F.A. at Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and a Ph.D. at Harvard University.

Author: Maryam Monalisa Gharavi
Design: IN-FO.CO
Year: 2018
Pages: 738
Dimensions: 5 x 6.75 in. 
Cover: Softcover
ISBN: 978-1-941753-20-0
Language: English