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︎ writing & commission queries: mandysmerzaban@gmail.com

Mandy is a London-based artist and writer investigating experiences of epistemic injustice, the systematic undervaluing and exclusion of knowledge based on such markers as race, class, gender and language, in arts and culture organisations.

Through listening, drawing and poetry, she explores the phenomenology of institutions, probing them as subjects for feminist, artistic thinking and observational humour. More recently, this research considers the potenital intersections of art, comedy and institutional critique.    

In 2022, she served as the Brooks International Fellow at Tate's Research and Interpretation department and was a resident at Delfina Foundation, conducting research on anti-racist acts, thinking, and communication in workplace culture. Her research employed ethnography, consultancy, poetry, photography, and artistic intervention.

From 2009 to 2018, as the founding curator at the Barjeel Art Foundation, Mandy 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.

With a Masters from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art (Aga Khan Program), her research delved into the transnational shift in museum exhibitions and the complex power dynamics of inclusive representation within the context of underrepresented female Arab modernist artists. In addition, she holds an MA in Cultural Translation from the American University of Paris (AUP), where her research examined the role of subjectivity and encounter in translation as a receptive bilingual. This research informs her ongoing project, An Unknown Lover’s Discourse.