Insanity Fair
Zoobs
Elephant West, London
13th March – 9th April 2020
The works in Insanity Fair were drawn from photographic series and videos produced by Zoobs Ansari between 2014 and 2018 while living in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they examine the allure of fame and the disillusionment that follows when success proves hollow or long-held dreams fail to materialise. Underpinning these concerns is a more existential anxiety: the fear of death, anonymity, and cultural erasure.
Zoobs’s fascination with celebrity culture began in childhood. Born in London to Pakistani immigrant parents, he experienced the loss of his father at the age of eight, a formative event that compounded the sense of isolation associated with difference and bereavement. Drawing pop icons such as Blondie, Madonna, and ABBA became a source of comfort and escape. Television programmes including Dallas and Dynasty offered visions of an alternative world in which glamour, wealth, and beauty appeared to shield their protagonists from the harsher realities of life.
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An education in graphic design and photography at Kingston University, followed by an apprenticeship with Serge Lutens at Shiseido in Tokyo, sharpened Zoobs’s awareness of the transformative power of image-making. Through make-up, styling, lighting, and photographic composition, he discovered the capacity to elevate the ordinary into the extraordinary—a form of creative agency that continues to fascinate him and shape his practice.
The earliest series in the exhibition, Word Searches (2013), echo the size of Andy Warhol’s silkscreen portraits, and similarly depict celebrity figures – in this case from the British pop music canon. Digitally manipulated photographic portraits are overlaid with word searches composed of lyrics from a signature song. Printed on layered acrylic and mounted in light boxes, the works function as memorials to modern cultural deities. Warhol’s influence can also be seen in Zoobs’s video portraits inspired by the former’s Screen Tests, silent, black-and-white portrait films produced between 1964 and 1966.
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In a further exploration of the power of celebrity image-making, a series of black-and-white photographic portraits recall the studio photography of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Featuring both emerging and established actors, musicians, and models, these works operate as homages to the studio system that first codified the language of cinematic glamour.
Yet Insanity Fair also reveals the corrosive effects of relentless aspiration beneath this surface of perfection. The pursuit of fame and beauty gives way to loss, compromise, and self-destruction; Vanity Fair becomes Insanity Fair. These tensions are made explicit in the Forever Young series (2014), a contemporary reworking of the vanitas tradition and the later Social Anxiety collage portraits (2018), which assemble fragments from earlier beauty shoots into grotesque and unsettling composite faces.
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About the Photographer
Zoobs (Zubair Ansari) is a British multimedia artist based in London. Drawing on influences from fashion, film, and art history, his mixed media works and fine art photographs explore themes of physical perfection, self-image, disguise, sexuality, and celebrity.
He established his reputation in the early 2000s, exhibiting in private and commercial spaces in London and internationally, including the Saatchi Gallery, Guy Hepner Gallery, and Opera Gallery. His work is held in international private collections, including that of Dolce & Gabbana, who acquired The King of Pop and God Save the Future Queen—portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge—for their Mayfair flagship in 2011.
Since the outset of his career, Zoobs’s work has attracted sustained media attention and has been featured in publications ranging from Vogue and Vanity Fair to Wall Street International.
Credits
Elephant Publishing
Catalogue Printing
Genesis Imaging
Exhibition Prints
Zoobs
Catalogue Design
Presented by Victoria Kriyosheva