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︎ cv︎ portfolio
︎ writing & commission queries:
mandysmerzaban@gmail.com
bio
I am an artist and writer with a multimedia poetry practice based in London.︎
In 2026, an exhibition of my multimedia poetry project Fake Love & Institutional Longing (BTS) is at John Hansard Gallery at the University of Southampton from 28 April - 5 September. It considers how Orientalism, the West’s destructive imaginary of the ‘East’, changes form over time: from masking itself in contemporary culture and institutions within neoliberalism to love and longing within diasporic experience. The project unravels within the magnetic aura and altar of K‑pop, choreography, and sonic artifacts, using BTS’s (방탄소년단) Fake Love (2018) as a kinetic cypher, or key, for the project’s poems and archival research. Alongside Amrita Dhallu, we are leading a (BTS) Fake Love Poetry Workshop on the final day of the exhibition.
As part of Jack Ky Tan’s Makan Makan lunch banquet, the performative culmination of his artist residency at Camden Arts Centre, Caught in the Middle, I presented a series of new poems (menu of poetic starters) in response to his research on the colonial middle.
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In 2025, I published my first pamphlet of poetry a heart gills with Short Pieces That Move in Rotterdam and I was the poet-in-residence at John Hansard Gallery, organised by artist and guest curator Jack Ky Tan. My poetry residency project Fake Love & Institutional Longing (BTS) considers poetry, phenomenology, choreography and colonialism within K-pop, Orientalism and colonial archives with primary research at Royal Asiatic Society.
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In 2024 I was part of CVAN London’s co-learning collective the Writers’ Room, led by artist Jack Ky Tan this was a nine month writing programme for organisations wanting to evaluate the institutional language they use and to create new vocabularies of equity and care, culminating in the publication Policy for Policy. In relation to this I responded to the AREVA report on anti-racism in the arts with Do let us, destroy the pyramid. In collaboration with Mosaic Rooms and artists yasamin and sass, I led bad comms poetry, a poetry workshop at the Feminist Library about deconstructing emails, legalese and statements we consider bad communications to make word banks and poetry. As part of The Archive as a Gathering Place programme at Tate curated by Vasundhara Mathur, I co-led a focus group on archives and social movements.
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In 2022, I was a Brooks International Fellow at Tate’s Research and Interpretation department and was a resident at Delfina Foundation, conducting research on anti-racist policy, thinking, and communication within workplace culture. My research considered the emotional architectures of institutional life through conversation, poetry, photography, and artistic intervention. This culminated into a presentation on institutional poetics: a lexicon of counter-productivity at Peer Gallery in 2023. ︎
From 2009 to 2018, as the founding curator at the Barjeel Art Foundation, I organised over twenty international exhibitions showcasing underrepresented SWANA region and diaspora artists, with venues including Yale University Art Gallery, Singapore Art Museum, and Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, among others. ︎
I studied in the department of History, Theory, and Criticism in the Aga Khan Programme for Islamic Architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2021 and Cultural Translation at American University of Paris in 2015.