BIOGRAPHY

Melika Shafahi was born in Iran in 1984. Like the rest of her generation, born after the Islamic Revolu-tion of 1979, she grew up negotiating with the paradoxes of contemporary Iranian life: the influence of American consumer culture versus the austere religiosity of the state; the divisions between public and private spheres. After training in photography in Tehran, Melika studied at the School of Fine Arts in Lyon and now lives between Tehran and Paris. This training, based on contrast and hybridity, has been essential in her work as an artist. From these formative years, the artist often works by creating meticulous and colourful - one might even say theatrical - large-scale stagings that reflect her own hybridity, combining the light and composition typical of Renaissance painting with oriental visual references. In her recent work, Melika explores globalized social culture, an aesthetic that itself blurs the boundaries between artificial and real, fact and fiction, embracing their impact on the behavior of all societies.