Ramin Haerizadeh, The Lunch on the Grass, 2010, 200 x 300 cm, mixed media on canvas.

Ramin Haerizadeh, Here Comes the Sunrise, 2009, 200 x 220 cm, collage mixed-media on canvas.

Ramin Haerizadeh, Sweet Shirin, 2009, 200 x 220 cm, collage mixed-media on canvas.

Ramin Haerizadeh, Memoir (4), 2010, 91 x 61 cm, mixed media on canvas board.

Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde
Al Quoz 1, street 6a
+ 97 1 (0)4 340 3965
Dubai
Ramin Haerizadeh
I’ll Huff and I’ll Puff
March 15-April 16, 2010

Iranian artist Ramin Haerizadeh deconstructs the symbols around us and reconstructs them to draw out darker, submerged and subtly humorous truths. Since his solo show in 2008 at Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, and his appearance in Charles Saatchi’s Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East and Galerie Thaddeaus Ropac, Ramin has created a raft of new work that delves deeper into the skewed psyche of his country. He emerges sensitive to the theatricality of Iran’s modern history and how to subvert that with a cinematographer’s eye.

For the artist’s latest collages he has gathered imagery from a TV production created for children in Iran, Shahr-e-Ghesseh (Farsi for City of Tales), to form a cast of characters that illustrate his ideas about the continuing process of remaking identities in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Shehr-e-Ghesseh was staged by an avant-garde theatre troupe in papier-mâché masks a decade before the Revolution. At the heart of the story is an elephant that arrives into a town of animals only to fall and break his tusk. The townsfolk, such as the mullah with the head of a fox, the bear who is a fortuneteller, and the parrot who is a poet, decide to ‘fix’ the broken elephant by placing the tusk on his head and snipping off his trunk. Without the features of an elephant, they decide he is no longer so and take him to register for an ID card — he is remade, given a human name, ‘Manouchehr’, and as the play continues his personality is lost.

Ramin makes Manouchehr his protagonist to illustrate the parallels he finds between this tale and the revolutionary identity-evolving force that deposed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and created the Islamic Republic. The artist takes cutouts from pre-Revolution society magazines of the Shah in his gleaming medals, or the Shah’s wife Farah Pahlavi, laughing in a park. He then inserts, among these, the imagery of the Shahr-e-Ghesseh. Grainy cutouts of the animal-headed characters begin to appear in strange and unnerving relationships with the other characters, until the Manouchehr-elephant’s head, with its misplaced tusk and docked trunk, sits atop the Shah’s coronation uniform.

While some of the collages, draped in columns of black and dayglo pink, retain the glossy orderliness of the magazines that he has scoured for his material; the hostile force of Ramin’s bearded, screaming face tears through these images. Ramin becomes as an actor in these works, wrapping himself in a chador to represent Iran’s fickle masses that, in their turmoil, look nostalgically back to the time of the Shah. Even the blackness of the chador calls to mind the thick black marker of the conservative censor. At times these characters blow kisses to the Shah and Farah Pahlavi, at others they look longingly to the exiled monarchy. His enraged face also raises questions about the assumed modesty-inducing effect of wrapping an entire nation in a black veil. This doesn’t quell the inner frustrations of the people, he suggests, nor does it stop their perhaps inherent ‘witchness’ (hence the brooms).

With this idea of Manouchehr, Ramin explores his own situation as an exile. In an affecting piece, we see a veiled figure holding the severed head of the elephant in a slash of red paint and standing atop the map of Iran, which has been made of cutouts of the cast of the Shahr-e-Ghesseh. We are all Manouchehr, Ramin says, all those who are no longer able to fit into the ever-changing identity that is Iran. Is it Islamic, is it Persian; what do these ideas mean, and how can we fit to that? Ramin points to the sacrifice of being remade at home or remade as an exile in this work.

Ramin Haerizadeh, Shahr-E-Ghesseh (12), 2010, 200 x 300 cm, mixed media on canvas.

Ramin Haerizadeh, Wonders of Nature (21), 2006-2007, C-print, 100 x 150 cm, ed. of 10.

Ramin Haerizadeh, Wonders of Nature (22), 2006-2007, C-print, 100 x 150 cm, ed. of 10.

Ramin Haerizadeh, Theater Group, 2008, Color-Print, 100 x 70 cm.

B21 Gallery
52182, Al Quoz 3
Dubai
+971 4 340 39 65
Ramin Haerizadeh –
Today's Woman
December 15, 2008-
January 15, 2009

Ramin Haerizadeh’s latest work tenaciously brings new life to familiar forms. With tremendous humour and a deft hand he has composed a new paradigm for artistic introspection with his elusively beautiful macro-scale self-portraits.

In each of the three series presented — Theater Group, Men of Allah, and Today’s Woman, clear elements of his cultural heritage emerge as the elegant basis for his strong graphic sensibility. He playfully appropriates the traditional Persian ornamentation, patterns and compositions found in his country’s architecture, carpets, mirror works and miniature paintings. The static image rarely achieves the amount of visual energy that Haerizadeh imbues his digital canvases with, balancing an implied animation and textural warmth with the cold precision of his technical capacity.

Yet Haerizadeh does not dwell on his chosen material nor is he searching for a means to reintroduce the time-tested visual themes of a great civilization. His is rather a process distinctly removed from chronology and convention, a process that began with a collection of images called Theatre Group.

For this series, Ramin found inspiration in "Tavier" theatre, the religious plays popular during the Qajar period (and still active today during Ashura celebrations), whose particularity was that women’s roles were played by men, who are still considered the only sex suitable for the profession. One of the most popular scenes was the wedding of the prophet Mohammad, in which the character wearing the white bridal gown is, notably, a bearded man. Taking off on this farce, Ramin has placed his own portrait (himself a thickly bearded man) within the guise of a chador-clad female.

Combining his signature style of photo manipulation and his penchant for performance, the Men of Allah collection reaches to the foundations of his talent. A bizarre pastiche of images of Haerizadeh’s own face and body, Men of Allah blurs our conception of gender and form. Morphed faces are set atop bloated bellies and bearded faces scarcely concealed by brilliant swaths of patterned fabric.

Stemming from the artist’s desire to express the full range of his experiences, Haerizadeh’s arresting mixed-media collages in his latest collection ‘Today’s Woman’ are no less provocative. Leaving no stone unturned in the pantheon of modern Iranian society, his free-form arrangements play upon the subjects and covers of pre-revolutionary woman’s magazines. Employing his own images and drawings, he organizes symbolic details that provide clues to an underlying content. As a new body of work in a new medium for the artist, it is reassuringly faithful to Haerizadeh’s humorous but sharp criticism of the political and social situation in Iran today.

This upcoming exhibition eloquently captures Haerizadeh’s untamed creative force, one that has intensified markedly in recent years. To enter into Ramin Haerizadeh’s world is to risk dissection but, like seeing a strange shrouded beauty, it offers one a glimpse of a unique mind at work.