Artist, illustrator and journalist describes herself as the 鈥淭MI QUEEN.鈥� If you鈥檙e unaware of her 鈥渢oo much information鈥� style, at her first private view at the Zari Gallery in London earlier in May, the first thing you saw was a making-of video for her 2016 artwork about pubic hair grooming injuries.
A blitz of Photoshop work that flies by in a few minutes, the time-lapse video shows how she took a journal entry picture and turned it into a colourful and eye-catching graphic with bright colours, elegant cursive titles and a scientifically accurate heatmap of the most common places where people injure themselves when they groom their pubic hair. Here鈥檚 the link to Mona鈥檚 story that accompanies the graphic if you聽.
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Guardian readers and her 133,000 followers on Instagram will be used to enjoying Chalabi鈥檚 in-your-face illustrations, but this isn鈥檛 the kind of thing you will usually see at a West London gallery. 鈥淲ho Are You Here To See?鈥� was mostly dedicated to a retrospective of her illustrative work published in the Guardian and on her Instagram account between 2014 and 2019, but like most of her witty graphics about topics as diverse as the pay gap, endangered species or the rarity of redheads, this opening party had a point. Visit a major art gallery, and you probably won鈥檛 encounter work from people like Chalabi. That鈥檚 to say, a woman. Or a person of an ethnic background that鈥檚 not white.
To reflect this, Chalabi created an artwork especially for the event. As her caption says, 鈥淚f all the artists in major US museums were represented by 100 people, 88 of them would be men.鈥� To show this stark fact, she beautifully illustrated this with a huge canvas showing a typical art space filled with those 88 men and 12 women artists. Behind this on the same canvas, it showed what the art world might look like if it represented reality. As you might expect, it鈥檚 a very different picture.
On another wall Chalabi created a 鈥渄rip painting鈥� showing the dire historical record of the Tate galleries in representing work by women. Since 2014, things have improved, but there鈥檚 still a long way to go. This work, a 鈥減ainting about the Tate鈥檚 paintings鈥� was based on a to show that the Tate still has 5.5 men for every 1 woman in their collection.
Chalabi鈥檚 work is compelling not just because she combines a journalistic work ethic with illustrative and artistic techniques. It鈥檚 also because underpinning it all is a rigorous approach to statistics, and a fearless campaigning style. Where else in the art world can you encounter artists who employ fact checkers?
There鈥檚 also a lot that scientists can learn from her approachable and understandable graphics. There鈥檚 no reason that the Jama Dermatology journal, which was the basis of her excellent pubic injuries illustration, shouldn鈥檛 or couldn鈥檛 employ Mona, or someone like her, to communicate its findings. In our opinion, the world鈥檚 not even close to getting too much of this TMI Queen.
鈥溾�� was on display at the . Follow for more of her work
