Greeting from America
Inspired by the ‘80s classic Coming to America, Malek satirizes the American Dream, rendering its ideological shortcomings palpable, in a series of works that depict a fictional African prince in the capitalist landscape of a Western metropolis. The images raise questions about meritocracy, privilege, and immigration, while contemplating American racial tensions as a class war as much as one based on ethnicity. The works are steeped in irony and references to pop culture, making them uncannily familiar and digestible despite their serious subject matter. In this way, Malek uses humour as a rhetorical trick to gain the viewer’s attention and trust, as opposed to being confrontational or didactic.

Oxycontin Blues

In the media, portrayals of addiction range from the harrowing to the quasi-romantic. But when it comes to white, upper-middle class women, it’s become a trope to aestheticize their experience as nihilistic glamour. Referencing mainstream cinema and fashion photography, Malek’s images poke fun at this trend. In one photograph, we see a glum woman, pill bottles scattered nearby. In another, she seductively eats jelly beans from a plastic container, as if there’s no distinction between candies and pharmaceutical drugs. These darkly seductive works reveal the sociological undercurrents of what appears to be pure style, and raises questions about the role photography plays as a political tool.

Conspiracy of Silence

Conspiracy of Silence is an exploration of the transactional nature of relationships, and of the spaces in which they occur. The works call to mind a landscape of strip clubs, seedy motels, restaurant kitchens, and parking lots – sites where the body is often reduced to a commodity of exchange and exploitation are pervasive. However, Malek eschews such a reductive reading, blurring the line between victim and perpetrator, and illuminating the multiple roles we can play simultaneously.

Locker Room

Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. This is no more accurate than in the case of Donal Trump’s presidency, in which the world seems to have been turned upside down. This inversion informs the works in Locker Room, where Malek imagines Trump moments as documentary photographs. From grabbing them by the pussy to his love of beauty pageants, Trump’s vices are on display in this series of works that call into question the nature of documentary photography as the lines between authentic and real become increasingly blurred.