Impermanent Collection (La Négresse, Pourquoi! Naître esclave?)

Impermanent Collection (La Négresse, Pourquoi! Naître esclave?) features a mirrored sculpture based on the bust by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux held in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum New York. Staging the scene in Epping Forest, London Maslen & Mehra placed the mirrored sculpture in an unusual root formation before capturing the scene on film. The composition echoes the sculptures theme of slavery and creates a sense of tension between the cultural object and its’ unusual nature setting.


Photoworks by MASLEN & MEHRA are included in collections such as Tattinger Switzerland, Art Es Collecion Madrid, numerous international private collections and more recently the Altered Landscape Collection, Nevada Museum of Art which includes artists such as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Lewis Baltz, Edward Burtynsky, Amy Stein, David Maisel, and Fandra Chang. Solo exhibitions have been staged in New York, London, Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Dubai, Istanbul, Sydney and Berlin. A monograph titled MIRRORED is dedicated to two major series of photographs, the Mirrored and Native series and was published by Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg with support from the Arts Council Of England with texts by art historian Edward Lucie-Smith and Eugen Blume, curator at the Hamburger Bahnoff Museum Berlin. In 2011 there was a solo presentation of work from these two series for the Scotiabank CONTACT International Photo Festival, Toronto and in addition a commissioned public installation of lightboxes was commissioned for Halifax Ferry Terminal. A solo exhibition for Art Month Sydney took place at Conny Dietzschold Gallery in March 2012 with solo exhibitions of a new body of work to take place this year in London and Istanbul.