“There is definitely something related to story (and stories) in Mirak Jamal’s art. Personal history is incorporated in a temporality made up of multitudes of stories which men have successively drawn in the matter in order not to forget. It’s in building materials that Mirak Jamal has found his favorite matter. He writes stories, pictures, reminiscences of a past of wandering after his family fled Iran at the dawn of the revolution.
In 1979, the Iranian revolution broke out. Many citizens were under the obligation to flee the country. Mirak Jamal was one of them. Then followed a long wandering across Eastern, then Western Europe. A wandering that lead him even further: the United States and Canada, where the expectations of a fair and protective democracy soon collapsed. He frequents waiting rooms, highways, buildings in which apartments «pile up» and urge the child and the artist to venture their gaze on non-visible things that, step by step, forged the patterns of a creative matrix. He draws frantically the things of his childhood’s daily life: Domestic scenes, a mother in a kitchen, a parade of the Iranian militia, tanks... with ballpoint pen. Preserved by his mother, these drawings became the material of intimate history. From Iran to Russia via Germany and the United States: Mirak Jamal has explored a multitude of territories without ever really settling. Stateless artist, accustomed to the piers, he plays with these multiple identities to construct a plastic work where the engraving functions as a trace of his past.” (Marianne Robin)
