Panni Malek

Panni Malek

''My work deals with human vulnerability, boredom, fragility and the imprisonment of oneself. My work has always been about things in myself that I feel incredibly uncomfortable and embarrassed by. I exploit what's dangerous and what scares me about myself. I collect and I hoard, my work has some kind of delicate profanity, and a certain over-passivity “If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”- Sylvia Plath.
Plath had a strange way of accepting her own presence in her life and work. In her first and only novel The Bell Jar, Plath slowly tells the unraveling story of her life and her first attempt at suicide, comparing her feelings of despair and vulnerability to the feeling of being trapped in a bell jar. Years later at her second attempt at suicide, she succeeded. It was this dethatched fragility that has influenced my most recent work.

I understand the neurosis that Plath so beautifully describes in her writing. I almost see my work as a series of contradictions, ideas and thoughts that I pull from very different parts of my experienced life. In logic two mutually exclusive propositions are propositions that logically cannot both be true. To say that more than two propositions are mutually exclusive may, depending on its context means that no two of them can both be true, or only that they cannot all be true. But somehow in my work this has naturally taken place. My subject matter suggests ideas of beauty vs. despair, shame, embarrassment and vulnerability that woman many times experience in their live


Panni Panteha Malek, 2010

b. 1984 Los Angeles CA


E D U C A T I O N

2006: Otis College of Art and Design - Bachelor of Fine Arts

2009: The New York Academy of Art - Master of Fine Arts


A W A R D S + P U B L I C A T I O N S

Published in the GRAFUCK II book on erotic art. 2008

Recipient of the Prince of Whales Fellowship , Residency at the Chateau Bellory.

Normandy, France. 2008

Recipient of The New York Academy of Art 2009-2010 Post-Graduate Fellowship.