Ahmad Morshedloo, Untitled, 2008, Oil on canvas, 178 x 366 cm.
Hayv Kahraman, Collective Cut, 2008, Oil on linen, 106.5 x 173 cm.
Wafa Hourani, Qalandia 2067, 2008, Mixed media, in 5 parts, 400 x 700 cm, Airport: 56 x 81 x 80 cm, Check Point and Bar: \56 x 80 x 73 cm, Qalandia Refugee Camp 1: 50 x 77 x 170 cm, Qalandia Refugee Camp 2: Base size: 81 x 50 x 110 x 7 x 127 cm, Height: 55 cm, Qalandia Refugee Camp 3: Base size: 120 x 20 x 82 x 100 cm, Height: 67 cm.
Wafa Hourani, Qalandia 2067, 2008, Mixed media, in 5 parts, 400 x 700 cm, Airport: 56 x 81 x 80 cm, Check Point and Bar: \56 x 80 x 73 cm, Qalandia Refugee Camp 1: 50 x 77 x 170 cm, Qalandia Refugee Camp 2: Base size: 81 x 50 x 110 x 7 x 127 cm, Height: 55 cm, Qalandia Refugee Camp 3: Base size: 120 x 20 x 82 x 100 cm, Height: 67 cm.
Diana Al-Hadid, The Tower of Infinite Problems, (detail), 2008, Polymer gypsum, steel, plaster, fibreglass, wood, polystyrene, cardboard, wax and paint.
Marwan Rechmaoui, Spectre (The Yacoubian Building, Beirut), detail, 2006-2008, Non-shrinking grout, aluminium, glass, fabric.
Ramin Haerizadeh, Men of Allah (01), 2008, C-Print, 100 x 150 cm.
Ramin Haerizadeh, Men of Allah (03), 2008, C-Print, 100 x 150 cm.
Ali Banisadr, Land Of Black Gold, 2008, Oil on linen, 137.2 x 193 cm.
Barbad Golshiri, The Portrait Of The Artist As A One Year Old Child, 2005, Print on canvas, 107 x 149 cm.
Ahmad Morshedloo, Untitled, 2008, Acrylic and pen on board, 90 x 120 cm.
Ali Banisadr, In The Name Of, 2008, Oil on linen, 137.2 x 183 cm.
Khaled Hafez, Mighty Hands Of Gemmis, 2008, Acrylic and collage on canvas, 200 x 250 cm.
Tala Madani, Ice Cream, 2008, Oil on canvas, 195 x 240 cm.
Ahmed Alsoudani, We Die Out of Hand, 2007, Charcoal, pastel and acrylic on paper, 274.3 x 243.8 cm.
Rokni Haerizadeh, Dagger Dance, 2008, Acrylic on canvas, 200 x 200 cm.
Shadi Ghadirian, Untitled from the Like Everyday series, 2000-2001, C-print, 183 x 183 cm.
Barbad Golshiri, Where Spirit And Semen Met, 2008, Installation, 230 x 74 cm.
Jeffar Khaldi, The Infinite and Beyond, 2008, Oil on canvas, 220 x 200 cm.
Jeffar Khaldi, Disgusted, 2008, Oil on canvas, 240 x 220 cm.
Diana Al-Hadid, Self Melt, 2008, Polymer gypsum, steel, polystyrene, cardboard, wax and paint, 190.5 x 147.3 x 142.2 cm.
Nadia Ayari, Syrian Dream, 2008, Oil on canvas, 40.5 x 35.5 cm.
Laleh Khorramian, Some Comments on Empty and Full (detail), 2008, Ink, oil, crayon, and collage on polypropylene.
Laleh Khorramian, Eden – 1st Generation (detail), 2005, Ink, oil on paper.
Tala Madani, Diving in Cake, 2006, Oil on canvas, 31 x 24 cm.
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Farsad Labbauf, Joseph (Gaze), 2008, Oil on canvas, 142.3 x 112 cm.
Sara Rahbar, Flag #10, 2008, Mixed media textile, 165 x 89 cm.
Tala Madani, Fork in Tattoo, 2006, Oil on canvas, 31 x 23 cm.
Tala Madani, Pink Cake, 2008, Oil on canvas, 40 x 30 cm.
Shirin Fakhim, Tehran Prostitutes, 2008, Mixed media, Life size.
Shirin Fakhim, Tehran Prostitutes, 2008, Mixed media, Life size.
Shadi Ghadirian, Untitled from the Ghajar Series, 1998-1999, C-print, 213 x 152 cm.
Shadi Ghadirian, Untitled from the Ghajar Series, 1998-1999, C-print, 213 x 152 cm.
Shirin Fakhim, Tehran Prostitutes, 2008, Mixed media, Life size.
Sara Rahbar, Flag #19, Memories Without Recollection, 2008, Mixed media textile, 203.2 x 116.8 cm.
Diana Al-Hadid, Self Melt, 2008, Polymer gypsum, steel, polystyrene, cardboard, wax and paint, 190.5 x 147.3 x 142.2 cm.
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Marwan Rechmaoui, Beirut Caoutchouc (detail), 2004-2008, Engraved rubber.
Hayv Kahraman, Heads On Plate, 2008, Oil on linen, 173 x 106.5 cm.
Hayv Kahraman, Flaying the Lamb, 2008, Oil on linen, 173 x 106.5 cm. |
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Saatchi Gallery
Duke of York's HQ
King's Road
020 8968 9331
London
Unveiled:
New Art
from the Middle East
30 January-
6 May 2009
Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East, presents work from 19 of the region’s most exciting artists. Dedicated to the flourishing contemporary Arabic art scene, the exhibition offers a concise contemporary survey of recent painting, sculpture and installation.
Despite a long-standing visual tradition going back several centuries and a fiercely independent creative mindset, new artists from the Middle East have been largely overlooked internationally because of the widespread political conflict that dominates the region. However, in recent years the contemporary art scene in Cairo, Tehran, Beirut, Jordan and Dubai has become more vibrant and active than ever before. In about five years Abu Dhabi will be the home of one of the most dense concentrations of cultural resources in the world, while artists from the region are shattering tidy preconceptions to present an extraordinarily diverse range of artistic expression emerging from the Middle East and its Diaspora.
Unveiled introduces some of the most gifted artists from the region showing their work in the UK for the first time. Artists in the exhibition are: Diana Al-Hadid, Halim Al-Karim, Ahmed Alsoudani, Kader Attia, Nadia Ayari, Ali Banisadr, Shirin Fakhim, Shadi Ghadirian, Barbad Golshiri, Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, Wafa Hourani, Hayv Kahraman, Jeffar Khaldi, Laleh Khorramian, Tala Madani, Ahmad Morshedloo, Sara Rahbar and Marwan Rechmaoui.
Diana Al-Hadid is a Syrian-American artist who lives and works in New York. Her sculptures take 'towers' as their central theme, drawing together a wide variety of associations: power, wealth, technological and urban development, ideas of progress and globalism. They are also – both in legends such as the Tower of Babel, and reality, such as the horrors of the World Trade Centre attacks – symbols of the problems of cultural difference and conflict. Al- Hadid's Tower Of Infinite Problems poses as a toppled skyscraper. Made from crude materials such as plaster, Styrofoam, wax, and cardboard, her structure is a monument to human fallibility. Sprawling on the floor like an imaginary archaeological find, the sculpture puts the viewer in a fictional role as futuristic observer, mourning the tragic follies of a past civilization. If viewed from the end, the two parts of the structure converge in an optical illusion, creating a spiral vortex suggesting a cyclical repetition of history.
Al-Hadid's geometric forms attempt to bridge mystical and scientific understandings of the world. As intensely patterned and detailed structures, her works draw from the traditions of Islamic art, where abstract motifs are used to encourage contemplation of God's infinite wisdom. An 'infinite wisdom' is also the focus of the particle physics research being done at the Large Hadron Collider — a 17 mile tunnel beneath the Swiss-French border — where scientists are attempting to locate the "God Particle" by reproducing the Big Bang. In Self Melt the top section of the sculpture is based on Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1556 painting The Tower of Babel. Presented upside down, the ziggurat becomes an inverted form, like an hourglass turning back time, suggesting a reversal of cultural diaspora. Through its rough hewn and barbaric appearance — reminiscent of a geological formation or frozen asteroid —Self Melt points to a mythological point of origin, where diversity and its consequences are supernaturally preordained.
Al-Hadid has described her work as "impossible architecture". All The Stops envisions a palatial structure, utilising stylistic elements from a variety of incongruous periods from medieval churches to futuristic stadiums. Shaping her work like an upturned trumpet, musical references are found throughout the piece: broken onceglorious columns are made from plastic recorders, decorative tiers are shingled with tiny piano keys. The spindly architecture suggests the evasive quality of sound, with each level contributing to a sense of harmonic rhythm. The building however, is presented as a ruin, empty and desolate, its decrepit power culminating in an eerily silent crescendo.
Iraqi artist Halim Al-Karim underwent a harrowing experience during the first Gulf War. Opposing Saddam’s regime and its compulsory military service he took to hiding in the desert, living for almost three years in a hole in the ground covered by a pile of rocks. He survived only through the assistance of a Bedouin woman who brought him food and water and taught him about gypsy customs and mysticism. Al-Karim has since emigrated to America, however, these events have had a profound effect on his life and form the basis for his art practice.
In Hidden Face, Al-Karim presents a series of triptychs, each comprised of three faces. Some are well known figures, such as Saddam Hussein in Hidden Face, others are film stills, artworks, or artifacts. Presented as enlarged panels their distortion is compounded, raising the question not of what they represent but of their deeper meaning and interconnectivity. Hidden Face was made in 1995, years before the famous photo of Saddam in custody; the figure is in fact made up, based on how Al-Karim imagined the dictator would look in the future. The two flanking out of focus figures are suggestive of world leaders — still in power — whose support of Saddam’s regime has been forgotten. Al-Karim has blurred their identities to show the duplicity of their motives, scripting them as anonymous accomplices who will never stand trial.
In Hidden Prisoner, photography is used for its non-physical qualities: a medium which quite literally creates an image from light, capturing the transient and interwoven nature of time and memory. The Sumerian artifacts featured in Al-Karim’s Hidden Prisoner and Hidden Goddess were photographed in the Louvre and the British Museum; Al-Karim describes seeing them interned behind glass, far away from their home, as a painful reminder of visiting his friends and family who were held as political prisoners at Abu Ghraib during Saddam’s regime.
Al-Karim's Hidden series is a response to the artists own unimaginable experiences and his ongoing observances of the turbulences in his homeland. With pieces titled Hidden War, Hidden Victims, Hidden Witnesses, Al-Karim raises the awareness of not only the devastating effects of violence, but its many manifestations — both physical and psychological — from the political to the economic and domestic. His works adopt a skewed sense of scale and resolve to conceptually shift between the macro and the micro, the societal and individual, physical and emotive, offering a tranquil and meditative pause and space for reflection and catharsis.
Al-Karim merges aspects of Sufism — such as the belief in Divine Unity — with obsolete traditions, especially those of ancient Sumer, the grand empire which ruled in what is now Iraq from 6000-4000 BC. Sumerian symbols often appear in his images, and his photographs of women are in part inspired by a ritual which could elevate girls to the status of goddesses.
Al-Karim's approach to image-making is as an outward projection of his inner-consciousness and a visual manifestation of spiritual awakening and serenity. His evasive dream-like images evoke a range of instinctual emotive responses, the ability of true perception existing as a preternatural power within each of us, which can be understood and harnessed through the pursuit of metaphysical enlightenment.
In pieces such as Hidden Doll, Al-Karim presents his photographs beneath a tautly stretched layer of white silk fabric that operates as both a physical veil masking the portraits and a metaphorical filter or screen. This "barrier" between viewer and image can be conceived as a liminal space, a transcendental portal between being and becoming, where the mystical properties of change take place.
Themes of reconciliation are central to Al-Karim’s work, both emotionally and in relation to Sufi tradition, where faith is inwardly focused and strives for unity between consciousness and God. Contradictions and juxtapositions occur within his photos, but rather than creating tension, they have harmonious effect. As faces line up: beautiful and garish, monstrous and innocent, wizened and puerile, they form single conglomerate portraits, each segment completing the next, contributing to the understanding of the whole. In Hidden War 2, Al-Karim has covered his images with a transparent layer of cloth, urging the viewer to consider the hidden agendas behind the legitimising rhetoric of those who support the war.
During the first Gulf War, Ahmed Alsoudani fled to Syria before claiming asylum in America. Through his paintings and drawings he approaches the subject of war through aesthetics. Citing great artists of the past such as Goya and George Grosz whose work has become the lasting consciousness of the atrocities of the 19th and 20th centuries, Alsoudani’s inspiration comes directly from his own experiences as a child, as well as his concerns over contemporary global conflicts. In We Die Out Of Hand, the earthy background sets the stage for dreary prison gloom, while hooded figures are obliterated through mercilessly violent gestures, insinuating the horrors of Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay with exquisite and torturous beauty.
Alsoudani executes his works with a raw physicality, using materials such as paint and charcoal in an unorthodox way, often painting over drawing and vice versa. You No Longer Have Hands is spread over two large pieces of paper, the seam down the middle operating literally as a divide. Like many of Alsoudani’s images, there are no people in this work, rather the concepts of violence are presented as something too large and abstract to comprehend. Instead a graffiti strewn wall provides a hint of humanity against a raging black mass, torrential, abject and bereft.
Alsoudani’s Untitled is barely recognisable as a portrait. Mixing charcoal with paint, the surface evolves as a dirty corporeal mass, as pure colours become tinged by sooty dust and paint drips down the canvas in contaminated streams. Describing what might be a head, Alsoudani offers up an anguished abstraction combining organic textures with geometric forms. Rendering carnage with an almost cartoon efficacy, Alsoudani summates the base instinct of destruction as a volume of fleshy fields punctuated by industrial rubble; hard-edged circles and arcs lend an absurd consumerist familiarity suggesting windows and bullet holes in the cold pictograph motifs.
"The falling statue of a despot in the centre of Baghdad I recalls the toppling of the statue of Saddam. The rooster-like figure symbolizes America. Here the rooster is not only a figure of control but is injured as well and constrained. The basket of eggs to the left side of its neck represents ideas — unhatched ideas in this case; an armory of fragile potential. Alsoudani's fascination with molecules and cellular references are apparent in the central egg-shaped object in the center of the rooster's belly. The flood bursting through on the bottom center of the canvas carries Biblical associations and references the fractured nature of daily life in Baghdad — nothing works, pipes burst, the city is tacked together, evoked by the large nails depicted in different parts of the canvas. A figure on the upper right of the canvas bursts forth in a flourish of pageantry, representing the new Iraqi government, sprung forth from the chaos, compromised, bandaged and standing precariously on a teetering stool.
"Baghdad II depicts a 'typical' Baghdad scene: on the left side of the canvas a car has crashed into an American-built security wall — another suicide bombing attempt or an act of pure desperation. Stylized licks of red flame come up from the ground, an eyeball has rolled to the center of the painting on the bottom. The eyeball plays a role in terms of content and form but also alludes to Lebanese poet Abbas Baythoon. On the lower right hand side of the painting a head lies behind bars — this is a reference to a statue in Baghdad, which here Alsoudani has decapitated and, ironically, brought to life as an imprisoned figure. One way to read this is that under Saddam’s dictatorship art was constricted and imprisoned and this idea of censorship is continually evoked through a layered approach in this work. The female figure in the center right side of the painting is deliberately drawn in as opposed to painted, a martyr-figure both carrying and giving birth to change."
— Robert Goff
Alsoudani’s Untitled mesmerizes with the power and chaos of an explosion, combining artistic references with combustive force. Reminiscent of cubist dynamics, Alsoudani approaches his theme of war from every angle, broaching the incomprehensibility of combat and its repercussions through his fragmented and turbulent composition. Drawn in charcoal and pastel Alsoudani’s gestures convey raw passion and intensity with a rarefied elegance, his subtle shading and ephemeral acrylic washes simultaneously evoking the detailed etching in Goya’s Disasters of War and the hyper-violent media graphics of Manga illustrations. Alsoudani negotiates these terrains with unwavering authority, responding to current events with commanding hindsight to develop contemporary history painting that’s both high-impact and enduring.
In Ghost, a large installation of a group of Muslim women in prayer, Kader Attia renders their bodies as vacant shells, empty hoods devoid of personhood or spirit. Made from tin foil — a domestic, throw away material — Attia’s figures become alien and futuristic, synthesising the abject and divine. Bowing in shimmering meditation, their ritual is equally seductive and hollow, questioning modern ideologies — from religion to nationalism and consumerism — in relation to individual identity, social perception, devotion and exclusion. Attia’s Ghost evokes contemplation of the human condition as vulnerable and mortal; his impoverished materials suggest alternative histories or understandings of the world, manifest in individual and temporal experience.
Taking inspiration from artists such as Phillip Guston, Nadia Ayari's work is primarily concerned with the act of painting itself, how the formal qualities of expression become fused with the artist’s imagination, providing opportunities for introspection, escapism, social critique, and storytelling. Central to this body of work is the concept of disembodied identity which Ayari conceives through symbolic representation. Beirut pictures a line of fingers adorned with scarves and daggers standing guard over the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. This painting was made in 2006 at the time of the Israel-Lebanon conflict. Through the title she transplants this famous landmark to Beirut to indicate her feelings of solidarity with the Lebanese people; the painting is envisioned as a talisman, protecting the oldest Islamic building in the world.
Raised in Tunisia, Ayari didn't start working with her Middle Eastern subject matter until she’d moved to America and notions of cultural heritage and identity came to the fore. She describes her practice as an awakening of self-consciousness. SidiBou takes its name from Sidi Bou Said, a popular tourist destination in northern Tunisia renowned for its blue and white buildings and cobbled streets. In Ayari’s work, the eye doubles as an 'I', a personified all-seeing entity, anonymous witness, portrayal of cognitive perception. In SidiBou, the eyeball is closed, a pink fleshy mass bearing the punk Mohawk stripes of eyebrows or lashes. The street signs in the background read: "Avenue Iraq" and "Palestine Street".
For Ayari, who grew up in the religiously tolerant culture of Tunisia, the burka is less a politicised issue than a source of fascination; she acknowledges its suppressive role within patriarchal societies, but also views it as an enviable means of 'disappearing', its anonymity providing a sense of comfort and empowerment. In WshhWshh, two women are shrouded in a flat black mass, thinly painted to be flush with the picture plane. Their faces transformed into giant eyes, they are not seen, but observe everything. Ayari illustrates them sharing a secret, heightening the mysteries surrounding the veil.
Giving her disembodied oculi a sense of agency or personhood, Ayari often animates their appearance with attributes such as eyelashes or clothing; in The Fence, her lash-less eyeball is rendered as naked and vulnerable, imprisoned within a refugee camp. Ayari’s tension between narrative and abstraction is exemplified in this painting as her statement about human rights concerns becomes encoded in a formal approach to composition and markmaking. The simplified geometric patterns created by the central circle, the evil-eye shape, and chain-link fence are inspired in part by Arabic calligraphy as well as traditional Tunisian ceramic painting.
The Book takes the Quran as its subject, and its square-in-square composition is deceptively complex. Referencing Malevich's supremacist design which approached abstraction as an embodiment of pure emotion, Ayari attempts to translate the sanctity of religious doctrine and experience, to understand its meanings by manifesting its form in the physical medium of paint. Rendered in grand scale, size is used to denote the scripture’s importance. Ayari, who does not consider herself to be religious, allowed herself to be directed through an intuitive response to her subject when making this work, her gestures informed by childhood memory and rediscovery of the values of prayer and ritual.
Ayari usually works in small scale, a process which allows her to complete her paintings in one or two days and retain an intensity of concept and energy. Through her absurd scenarios she develops an intricately woven and constantly extending narrative that underpins and contextualises her practice as whole; each painting operates as a scene from her ongoing story. Right Of Return is one of the original images from which her other paintings have developed: imagining the release of a group of Palestinian prisoners from an Israeli jail, as witnessed by a little girl who will grow up to become a suicide bomber. For Ayari, authoring these fictive scenarios is a way of personalising the abstract nature of geo-politics and gaining a more intimate understanding of how global conflict affects each of us as individuals.
Ayari’s paintings offer a stranger than fiction response to some of the most controversial issues surrounding the Islamic world. Her ability to present highly provocative ideas in an endearing and sensitive way is facilitated by her use of paint: through images she can suggest things which would be outrageous to say otherwise. Her canvases are terrains where quick comic wit is tempered by a profound engagement with painting's history and practice, citing influences as diverse as folk art, abstract expressionism, and Arabic artifacts and hand-crafts. In Hive, Ayari’s eyeballs line up in militaristic fashion, like interlocking landmines or giant insects, imposing a perverse conformity through their suggested violence.
Informed by a news story about the burgeoning Syrian undergarment industry, Syrian Dream broaches the dichotomies of the expected roles of women within Islamic culture. Within the Quran, a healthy approach to sex is encouraged and mutual satisfaction of married partners is held sacrosanct. Donning sexy lingerie beneath chadors is an increasing practice, and in Syria this trend has been further popularised through the sale of high-tech knickers which incorporate elaborate light and sound effects through electronic chips stitched into the lining; some even come with remote control. Through her hilarious rendition of a burka-clad Cyclops eying up a pair of raunchy smalls, Ayari’s shrewd parody re-evaluates the contradictory mores which simultaneously encourage women’s public chastity and private lasciviousness. The Holy Quran pendant around the woman’s neck is a symbol of religious observance, which ironically is one of the key marketing strategies used by Syrian undie-mongers.
Ali Banisadr is originally from Tehran, but moved to America when he was a child; his works are influenced by his experiences as a refugee from the Iran-Iraq war and his approach to abstraction evokes connotations to displacement, memory, nostalgia and violence. In The Name Of possesses all the qualities of a fantastical landscape, its rich aromatic colours disseminating a fairytale orientalism that’s both majestic and medieval. Amidst his lush surface, splendour gives way to embellished anarchy and carnage as onslaughts of painterly gestures replicate the chaos of an attack. The fractured background, reminiscent of stained glass, is inspired by his recollection of the sound of shattering windows during bombings. This synaesthetic connection between auditory memory and visualisation is consistent throughout his work.
In Banisadr’s paintings, his own memories become combined and fused with Persian mythology, such as Marco Polo’s discredited story of the Hashshashin, a militaristic sect whose members were drugged and made to believe that the gardens behind their mountain top fortress were actually Heaven, where obedience might be rewarded by short visits, replete with feasting and vestal virgins. Land Of Black Gold conjures tales such as this through its elaborate composition and suggested narratives. Influenced by Persian miniatures — small intricately rendered illustrations similar to illuminated manuscripts — Banisadr’s canvas spans like an ancient map, a spatially skewed terrain of detailed activity. Throughout is a disorientating sense of wonder as angular shapes propose topsy-turvy architecture, out of scale figures are formed from indulgent dabs and exotic fauna and pools evolve from luscious smears and layered washes. Rendered in the golds and blues associated with European religious painting, Banisadr baths his scene of earthly pleasures in a divine glow, ignited by bombardments in the distance.
Often compared to Hieronymus Bosch, Banisadr’s portentous scenes are spellbinding in their finite description. From a distance their intensely busy surfaces appear to be rendered in microcosmic detail, yet when viewed close up, recognition dissolves into a frenzy of sensitive and compacted brush work. Banisadr handles paint with a sentient physicality, his extravagant textures and vibrant tones visually translate the experience of taste, smell, and especially sound into fields that extrapolate cacophonous rhythms. In Prisoners of The Sun (TV) this sensory disconcertment is echoed in its allusion to temporal collapse as antiquated scenes of imagined civilisations blend seamlessly with TV test patterns, the hard-edged geometry of mass media linking disquietly with the strata of ancient mysticism.
Shirin Fakhim’s Tehran Prostitutes uses absurd and sympathetic humour to address issues surrounding the Persian working-girl circuit. In 2002 it was estimated that there were 100,000 prostitutes working in Tehran, despite Iran’s international reputation as a moralistic country with especially high standards placed on women. Many of these women are driven to prostitution because of abusive domestic situations and the poverty incurred from the massive loss of men during the war; in response to Iran’s strict religious laws, some even consider the profession as an act of civil protest.
Fakhim’s sculptures play on the duplicitous perceptions of streetwalkers, highlighting the hypocrisy surrounding the sex industry. Made from found materials, her assemblages are grotesque configurations, exaggerating rough-trade stereotypes of wig-wearing, melon-chested slappers contortedly stuffed into ill-fitting lingerie (in reality Tehran vice-girls wear hijabs and are identifiable through more covert and subtle signals). Fakhim farcically combines westernized hooker fashion with the codes of Islamic demur, torsos and heads made from cooking implements, adorned with make-shift veils and chastity belts.
Using ordinary objects and items of clothing, Fakhim exaggerates the less than flattering associations of floozy hygiene, her readymade materials driving home the punch lines of rude jokes. Blond wigs shoved down pants make for Sasquatch bikini lines, wayward bits of rope reveal pre-op transsexuals, and a carefully placed abacus reads more like a send up than evidence of financial acumen. Fakhim ironically stages this menagerie as a source of ridicule, provocatively placing items such as alms baskets and air fresheners to illustrate public scorn and social stigma.
Fakhim’s ladies of the night approach the naked body as a source of taboo. The discomfort of looking at them is displaced through a purile, intolerant, and scapegoat humour, revealing more about public attitudes and ignorance than about prostitutes themselves. Issues such as female genital mutilation, transgender orientation, homosexuality and cross dressing are all awkwardly broached through her vulgar approximations of stitched up crotches and mis-matched private bits, confusing the brutal, illicit, forbidden and desirous.
Fakhim’s life sized sculptures, Tehran Prostitutes, are strangely totemic, connoting a certain black-market power and ritual in their reference to the early 20th century fashion of ‘primitivism’. With hour-glass figures formed from portable stoves and adorned with cheap market-stall wares, Fakhim’s assemblages point to a commodification of necessity, their make-shift charm belied by associations to poverty, domestic violence, economic migration and human trafficking.
Approaching sculpture as an intrinsically tactile activity, Fakhim chooses her materials with a playful sensitivity. Crafted from the female stuff of fabric, clothing, and kitchen apparatus, her sculptures temper benign domesticity with a bawdy coarseness, creating a vaudevillian humour from over-stretched stockings, sickly green terrine masks, and exaggeratedly padded brassieres. Hardy practical tools such as stoves and pots create a physical contrast to the fussy adornments of lace and garters, creating an image of sexual prowess that’s conspicuously ill-fitting, painful, and tragic.
Challenging the international preconceptions of women’s roles within an Islamic state, Tehran-based artist Shadi Ghadirian’s photographs draw from her own experiences as a modern woman living within the ancient codes of Shariah law. Her images describe a positive and holistic female identity, humorously taking issue with the traditional roles by which women — both in the Middle East and universally — have been defined.
Ghadirian uses an ordinary kitchen utensil as a readymade pun. Through her simple recontextualisation of a cleaver, she develops a fictional character of hilarious proportions as the old adage of "hatchet face" comes to life as a one eyed shrew. Branded with the knife company’s label — Shogun — she’s not a woman to be reckoned with.
Through her staged photographs, Ghadirian’s everyday objects become elevated from anonymity to form a group of distinctive portraits. Humorously drawing upon the humanistic forms of each item, common goods resonate with suggestive narratives, ironically exaggerating misogynist typecasts. In this work a colander adeptly represents a woman who’s all mouth: a neighbourhood gossip conceived as a human sieve, endlessly broadcasting like a loud speaker.
A shrouded broom huddles with timid demureness, her form most associated with "doormat;" beneath her veil, however, the broom handle stands in for a sturdy backbone. With her countenance made up of a straw besom, her expression appears wizened and worn, indicating time honoured knowledge and the tenacity and temper of a charwoman.
Her Like Everyday series was created from the plethora of domestic gifts she received after her wedding — items completely foreign to a young professional. Using these objects — such as irons and frying pans — as masks to cover the faces of her veiled sitters, Ghadirian’s photos ironically portray a one-dimensional interpretation of housewives, absurdly reducing their identities to cooks and cleaners.
The title of Ghadirian’s Like Everyday series refers both to the materials she uses in her photos and the derogatory social perceptions that women regularly face. Her cast of crudely rendered women cleverly reinvents the sources of negative stereotyping as attributes of empowerment. A grater-faced wife, the dreaded prototype of mother-in-law jokes everywhere, radiates a steely and abrasive determination.
Replacing the expected monotone of the black chador with vibrantly patterned fabrics, each portrait suggests a vivacious individuality and character, belying the limitations of stereotype. Similarly, the mundane objects, when transformed into faces, become highly poised and charismatic caricatures, embodying individual personalities.
The Ghajar dynasty ruled Iran from 1794-1925; and from its inception photography was popular with the elite, documenting women as well as men. The images from this period tend to share stylistic devices: people are posed, usually as individuals rather than groups, in the very elaborate settings of their homes, often sat next to or holding prized possessions or objects of status. In photos of this period, women were permitted to be pictured in less formal dress within the privacy of their homes, and some members of the Shah’s harem were even photographed in tutus in accordance with his predilection for the ballet. Though Ghadirian’s images replicate the settings and traditional costumes of this time, her women are presented in a much more modest way in their postures and poses, in adherence to more ‘contemporary’ custom.
Inspired by 19th century photographs from the Ghajar period — the first portraits to be permitted by religious law — Ghadirian carefully reconstructed the opulent style of these images with the help of many friends: borrowing antique furnishings and costumes, commissioning the painted backdrops, inviting them to pose in the images. Picturing each woman in a bygone era, each scene is jarringly interrupted by the presence of contemporary products — a phone, boom-box, hoover — pointing to a culture clash of tradition and progress. The women stare out from the photos with an unnerving directness, detached from their environment, and confident within themselves.
Ghadirian’s Untitled from the Ghajar series is shocking not only for its anachronistic props, but for the sheer brazenness of her subject: defiant in her gangsta posturing and holding a ridiculously large ghetto-blaster. Ironically, this image is most in keeping with her historical references, showing the self-possessed attitude of her sitter. In this piece Ghadirian’s surreal time-warp happens in reverse: the initial joke is that the 1980s radio is out of place in the antique setting, but it is the vintage scene and pose which is in fact much more modern. Ghadirian uses this subtle humour to describe a contemporary Iranian female experience of existing as if outside of time.
Barbad Golshiri’s practice is prolific and wide ranging — extending from photography and sculpture to installation, films and critical writing. Central to some of his recent pieces is the examination of how media is used and how it manipulates the regime and its masses in his homeland of Iran. Golshiri’s Portrait Of The Artist As A One Year Old Child is an altered photograph of himself as a baby — taken in 1983, the year a close friend of Golshiri’s family, with a son the same age as Barbad, was executed. The image is presented as a reversal of fortune, illustrating the precariousness of circumstance and the spanning consequences of violence; in Persian the word 'reverse' is the same word used for 'photo'. Hung upside down, Golshiri’s Dorian Gray-like portrait warps time, conceiving an alternative course of events. The child’s face has been digitally altered to that of a geriatric, freakishly weathered and wise; the inscription written at the top right of the image, "Barbad, when one year old, '62" — 1362 in the Persian Solar Hijri calendar — when inverted, suggests the baby is 62 years of age.
In Where Spirit And Semen Met Golshiri incorporates a portrait of infamous French poet Arthur Rimbaud — the archetypical tormented artist, who in his travels notoriously introduced himself as “I is an other”. Golshiri appropriates this reference in the philosophical sense, the ‘other’ being the self, contrasting the idea of “be yourself” against Iran’s post-revolutionary policy of unanimity or social uniformity that "purged" society of "undesirables" or those who didn’t "fit in." Coupling the photograph with a blue curtain which spatially cuts through and shrouds the face of the subject, Golshiri puts forth the concept that the other can be anyone. The words "shroud", "curtain", "screen" (as in cinema screen) and "hymen" are the same in Persian and Golshiri uses this play on words to intersect ideas of anonymity, power, and identity. The blue curtain is a recurring motif in Golshiri’s work; the omnipresent backdrop to religious and political broadcast in Iran, it is synonymous with nationalism, and serves a practical function as a ‘blue screen’ where subliminal propaganda messages can be inserted. The title of the piece comes from both secular and religious philosophy: in early Christian doctrine, semen conveys the spirit from God, synthesising body and soul, a concept echoed in the theories of Descartes where "soul," "personhood," or "identity" were thought to reside within and be symbolically realised within bodily matter.
Reminiscent of the traditional motifs of Persian tapestries, architecture, fabrics, and carvings, Ramin Haerizadeh’s work reconfigures the decadence of an ancient civilisation into lusciously futuristic tableaux. Printed as large photographs, his computer manipulated imagery conveys all the sumptuous associations of history within their super-slick modern surfaces. Using these appropriated forms as departure point for invention, Haerizadeh transforms tradition, myth, and legend into the realm of virtual reality, subverting convention through high-impact graphic design and digital modelling.
Haerizadeh’s Men Of Allah are influenced by Taaziye, an historic genre of theatre popularised in the Qajar dynasty (1794-1925). The plays often tell stories of the life of Mohammed, and are still performed during the Muharram observances which mourn the martyrdom of the Prophet’s decedents. In these photos Haerizadeh draws upon this religious ritual to stage scenes with the surreal dynamics of computer animation, displacing the sense of time, place, and gravitas, and conceiving the physical elements of theatre as technical illusion.
One of the key characteristics of Taaziye theatre is that plays are performed exclusively by men, even the lead female roles; in Iran women are discouraged from entering the acting profession. Casting himself in the place of every character, Haerizadeh uses his self-portrait as a means of social critique. Adopting the roles of both villains and victims, Haerizadeh’s bearded face becomes an uncomfortable mediator, transgressing gender, political, and religious boundaries through his highly sensuous images.
In Men Of Allah (05) Haerizadeh reworks the codes of gender, body, and sexuality. Intimately grouped and provocatively posed, the figures gather in a perverse harem; their bodies mutating in contorted forms, neither male nor female, but something much more epicurean and exotic. Haerizadeh approaches his photos with the luxuriance of painting, allowing the rich tones and textures to carry the image into near abstraction. The angular layered segments of his digital alterations create a reference to cubism, while the folded and mutated skin mirrors the drapery effect of the sumptuous clothes.
Haerizadeh’s Men Of Allah (08) uses technology to serpentine effect. Effusing the hyper-realism of virtual reality, his figures suggest an age-old tradition of street theatre, magic, and puppetry. Entwining these ideas of ancient and futuristic, Haerizadeh’s men evolve as bacchant gods, conveying a literary mysticism in their carnal revelry. Their otherworldliness is transmitted with hypnotic effect as flesh and fabric morph and aggregate in crystalline formations, envisioning a conjoined and refractive entity. Enshrouding the scene with an arabesque mystique, compressed and voluptuous bodies appear to be veiled in a gossamer of their own hair and tattoos, continuing the repetitive pattern formations of their regal pink garb.
Rokni Haerizadeh uses painting as a means to critique the hypocritical aspects of his culture. Haerizadeh’s Typical Iranian Wedding ironically describes the rigmarole of getting hitched, Persian style. Presented as a mammoth diptych, men and women are physically separated into two panels, which when coupled form a grand hall divided by a curtain. On the men’s side guests carouse with abandon amongst over-flowing buffet tables, live music, and lush flower decorations; while the ladies’ is a much more Spartan affair. Aside from the grotesquerie fashion show of primped up wives and girlfriends, there’s only one measly turkey and the lights are left on so as not encourage excessive party spirit. Haerizadeh rendersthese scenes with a satirist’s relish, considering every detail as a deliciously cruel and too accurate caricature.
Razm, is the Farsi word for fighting: considered in epic poetry, along with love, to be one of the two great heroic activities. Haerizadeh often takes inspiration from Persia’s rich literature — such as Ferdowski’s The Book of Kings or Rumi’s poetry and prose works – using its grand themes as allegories for contemporary Iranian social issues. In Iranian custom, rather than having a war, one soldier from each side was selected to partake in a duel to the death as a means to settle disagreements. Haerizadeh paints this scene in Razm with all the energy of a heated battle. On the left of the canvas, the protagonist strides his horse with masculine nonchalance, holding a diamond ring, his damsel’s prize. Smiting his enemy with a single blow, the right side of the canvas descends into violent abstraction, the fallen rider rendered in a cacophony of blurs and patterning, delineated by faint skeletal gestures and heavy cartoon outlines.
Dancing with swords is a traditional custom throughout the Arab world, usually performed by women as part of a wedding ceremony. Haerizadeh delivers this scene with the vivid exoticism of Matisse or Gauguin, his bold colours, heavy outlines, and opulent patterning re-appropriating the tradition of "orientalism." Haerizadeh uses this association with extrinsic idealisation to envision a burlesque parody of the morality of women: his acrobatic belly dancers, chained to the stage, have transformed into a nefariously devious troupe. In conventional ritual the sword represents the honour of the husband, which the girl on the right has "accidentally" dropped.
Humorously reminiscent of Eric Fischl’s paintings of nudes on beaches, Haerizadeh’s portrayal of life on the Iranian seaside falls woefully short of good-fun naturalism. Rendered as a diptych, Shomal (Beach At The Caspian) highlights the inequalities of the sexes, comically exaggerating the inadequacies of dress code. As the men frolic alfresco in the surf and sun, the women stroll lazily in full overcoats or continue their domestic duties serving picnics in black burkas. Haerizadeh executes this scene with the leisure of daydream, his fluid gestures and frothy brush marks capturing the sun-bleached languor of holiday idle.
Iranian funerals are elaborate affairs, often lasting several days and incorporating a multitude of ceremonies which extend from the highly staged to the deeply private. Haerizadeh’s Typical Iranian Funeral illustrates the contrast in these varied approaches to bereavement. In the canvas on the left, a meal is shared between the deceased close family and friends, a gathering of the nearest and dearest tellingly structured around divisive table arrangements. The civility of this custom is juxtaposed to an image of public ritual, with bodies on full display, grieved over by mourners-for-hire and strangers, as rites are proclaimed over graveside loudspeakers. In observing the paradoxes of everyday life, Haerizadeh creates a provocative and sympathetic portrayal of a society that’s fundamentally flawed, and infinitely endearing and relatable.
Wafa Hourani is a Palestinian artist living and working in Ramallah. Combining photography and sculpture his Future Cities projects deal with the social, political, and economic realities of Palestinian life to develop grim and apocalyptic predictions for the residents of the West Bank. Qalandia 2067 takes its name from the main check point crossing through the West Bank Security Fence which divides the cities of Ramallah and ar-Ram; it is a site of political unrest and human rights concerns. Dating his piece 2067 — one hundred years after the Arab-Israeli 6 Day War — Hourani has constructed 5 scale models envisioning the future of a refugee camp where time seems to have regressed rather than evolved. Basing each segment on an actual site — the airport, border crossing, and 3 settlements — the buildings are rendered as war-ravaged and crumbling, crowned by implausibly archaic remnants of TV antennae. Each building is a miniature light-box illuminating glimpses into the private lives of the residents through film strips placed in the windows, an unnerving reminder that this science fiction horror is, for many, an everyday experience.
Hayv Kahraman is an artist from Iraq. Spanning drawing, painting, and sculpture, her practice engages with very difficult issues surrounding female identity in her homeland — how women are victimised within their own culture, made subservient to men and often suffer the most from the effects of the war. Kahraman tells these tales of horror with a demure grace through her stunningly beautiful paintings. In this series of work, her images depict the scriptural story of the Sacrifice of The Lamb, which is central to the Islamic festival of Eid al-Adha, recasting the figures as women.
The Sacrifice of the Lamb is a legend which is recorded both in the Quran and the Bible. Abraham was told by God in a vision to sacrifice his only son as proof of his unquestioning devotion. In seeing the extent of Abraham’s faith God allows the substitution of a ram in the boy’s place. This event is symbolically repeated during the most important Muslim holiday where lambs are sacrificed as part of religious celebrations and feasts. Kahraman illustrates this fable from a woman’s perspective, controversially appropriating the sacred masculine theme to assert feminist equality. In these paintings the sacrificed lambs might also be metaphorically understood in relation to the practice of "honour" killings.
Kahraman’s Carrying On Shoulder I and Carrying On Shoulder II is an exquisitely painted diptych. Influenced by Persian miniatures, Renaissance and Chinese painting, art nouveau and fashion illustrations, Kahraman’s works convey a timeless classicism, setting her very contemporary dialogues within the rich fabric of history. Kahraman often portrays her characters with elongated swan-like necks, heightening their delicate refinement and physical and social vulnerability. The flattened perspective in her work conceives two-dimensionality as a conceptual contrast between joy and pain, illusion and reality, and peace and violence.
Painted directly onto stretched linen, Flaying The Lamb contrasts the natural rough weave of the canvas with Kahraman’s highly polished painting technique, the juxtaposition between the real sumptuous fabric and the painted dresses heightening the spatial illusion. Though using a limited palette and simplified planar compositions, Kahraman achieves a tremendous amount of depth in her work through the intensity of her colours and veneers of layered patterning. Kahraman delivers this with effortless fluency: the whites of the lamb dazzle with the lustre of inlaid pearl and the black masses of hair expand like giant inky spills, replicating antiquity’s luxuriance.
Jeffar Khaldi doesn’t consider himself a political artist; the themes in his work evolve from his own experiences and ideas and thus provide the most powerful material for making art. In his canvases, harsh realities become mixed with imagined scenes, confusing fact and fiction with a sense of nostalgia or dreams. His tableaux are equally beautiful and uncertain. In Frozen, a man is rendered midfall, his position beatific and Christ-like. In the distance encampments of tents line the landscape, reminiscent of Palestine’s occupation.
Khaldi’s paintings convey theatricality in their portrayed subject matter and in their physical construction. Alongside modern influences such as the German Expressionists, Khaldi cites Persian miniatures as an interest in developing his work. His large-scale canvases evoke similarity to this ancient tradition in their geometrically balanced compositions, overwhelming detail, and flattened sense of space. In •The Infinite And Beyond the image becomes almost secondary to the spectacle of its making. The landscape is rendered with luscious mimetic sensibility: water created from thin liquidy washes, sky rendered with breezy-smoggy strokes, earth with dirty fields, and trees as shady patterns cut through with spindly twig-like gestures. The wall and building in the distance seem conspicuously solid in relation to their organic surroundings. The figure in the foreground is an almost ghostly apparition, his facial features duplicated, and arms heavily outlined in white suggest movement.
Laleh Khorramian's abstract paintings aren’t just paintings: they are prints. Developed through an intensive process that harmoniously combines both technical skill and unpredictable results, Khorramian begins each work by making a painting onto a sheet of glass. She then transfers the image onto paper by pressing the sheets to the glass while the paint is still wet. The resulting "monoprint" — or single print — is an event, an original irreproducible image, initially made without any direct contact from the artist's hand. In Eden – 1st Generation, Khorramian uses this process to create a large scale work reminiscent of an aerial-view map. Khorramian often uses her prints to create stop-motion animations, where she combs their textured and latent topographical imagery to find backdrops, objects, figures, and scenarios to her filmic narratives. She then proceeds to draw, wipe away, and scratch onto the surface of the print like notes and locations of events — inventing graphic scenarios of violence, intimacy, catastrophe, and imagined or impossible scenes, much of which to be shot and recorded for her films. For example, a number of the details within Eden – 1st Generation were included in her 2005 animation Chopperlady.
Some Comments On Empty And Full was made by collaging numerous monoprints together, their abstracted patterns forming a fantastical landscape. In this piece, the monoprints have been made on semi-plastic material, a substance which both replicates celluloid and resists liquid pigment. Again Khorramian reveals and emphasizes details by drawing over and scraping into the surface with marks and note taking. The resulting smears and sluices of contrasting earthy tones are assembled in an irregular shape, giving the illusion of apocalyptic terrain. Influenced by medieval chinese landscapes and its spiritual philosophy of space, the title draws upon notions of the atom and the aggregate, the individual, growth, decay and memory.
Farsad Labbauf’s paintings are immediately recognizable from his highly idiosyncratic style. Influenced by traditional Persian arts such as calligraphy, tapestry, and the poetry of Rumi, Labbauf’s contemporary portraits convey a metaphysical approach to painting where line, colour and texture are used less to "depict" an image than to describe its essence. In Joseph (Gaze), his realistic portrait of a man immediately breaks down as an illusion as hundreds of delicately applied brush strokes and carefully delineated tonal patterns transform the image into abstraction. Describing his work as "an attempt for the union of the internal", Labbauf’s paintings offer a meditative quality. Through their fragmented appearance, Labbauf’s images transcend fixed time or place, conceiving this unresolved state as a more accurate or truthful representation of reality.
Iranian-American Tala Madani paints a provocative and humorous discourse on cultural and sexual identity. Picturing the male domain in all its stereotypical glory, Madani’s portraits of Middle Eastern men play out fictive rituals of a deviant, distinctly female imagination: prayer gatherings twisted into homosexual orgies, birthday parties targeted for terrorist attack, and tattoos and body hair plucking construed as the latest in ultra-macho beauty makeovers. In devising her scenes of aberrant ceremony, Madani pinpoints the very essence of frustration, fervour, and inadequacy.
Stylistically ranging from lush painterly expressionism to loose, almost comical line drawing, Madani conveys her politically controversial subject matter with a genuine innocence and empathy. Rendered in soft, pastel palettes, her figures are humanised with a sentimental goofiness that belies their zealous bravado. Whether engaging in torture via flatware, engaging in group grooming, or assassinating chummy rivals, Madani’s cohort are less dangerous than cringe-worthy; their fetishised violence rendered tragic and flaccid, contriving the phenomenon of male bonding an embarrassing and lovable spectacle.
Appropriating the preconceptions of racial and gender difference as a departure point into the bizarre and surreal, Madani uses her position of ‘other’ to draft her own elaborate fantasies, detailing a riotous underworld of cliquey sect-like subterfuge. The motif of the birthday cake recurs in Madani’s paintings as an emblem of masculine ego. The impotence of melting candles protracting to the ultimate conclusion of "blow them out/blow them up," as pink gooey pastries become the signature trademark of her maverick suicide bombers.
In Line combines Madani’s sensitive approach to drawing with the more irreverent processes of graffiti. Using spray paint as a medium of protest, Madani juxtaposes its matted aerosol texture against fluid and pluming lines of oil paint. Picturing a men’s forum where peek-a-boo party games transform into opportunities for assassination Madani renders this scene with the measured flourish of calligraphy, tempering absurdity and cartoon violence with an antiquated gracefulness.
Drawing from her Iranian heritage where strict social etiquette creates a division between the sexes, Madani’s paintings gleefully envision what she imagines to be the ‘goings on’ at men-only events. In Holy Light, Madani pictures an everyday prayer meeting as a ritual of a more erotic variety, as devotees cower from the golden shower of divine blessing. Drawn out with marker pen and layered with yellow paint, Madani renders this scene with minimal detail, the painting’s crude content becoming a loaded approach to formalism.
The larger Madani’s paintings, the more abstract they become. While her tiny canvases embellish scenes with engrossing detail, pieces such as Tower Reflection— spanning four metres — reduce her outrageous narratives to only a few brush strokes. This shift in size draws comparison between the public understanding of complicated issues of violence and cultural identity and how they become manifest in individual experience. Madani considers these different ways of working as confronting two opposing dialogues of painting. Tower Reflection addresses the incompressible scale of terror with unnerving simplicity. Set against an interior decor toned backdrop, roughly drawn squares, evocative of aeroplane or theatre seating, pile on the canvas in emergency orange. Framed by two rectangular "windows" the spectacle plays out with diagrammatic accuracy of one "motif" passing through the other: a physical crash, a spiritual "crossing over," or the gross transformation of horror into instant replay media.
Madani’s Nosefall uses cartoonish exaggeration to comically devise an army of ineffectual suicide bombers. Taking ideas of macho identity to the extreme, Madani’s characters become unwittingly effeminate buffoons, undermined by their own zeal. Their prostate devotional poses ironically double as sexually submissive positions, a joke enhanced by suggestively phallic parachutes and pink mankini uniforms. Hardly the image of international threat, the entire squad is prone to high altitude nosebleeds. Madani paints this with subtle variation of style, using a combination of solid flat patterns and hurried sketching to create a sense of floating or weightlessness; the splash marks of gushing blood hint that the men have never left the ground.
Madani’s cloistered gatherings of men are humorously imagined through an ironic portrayal of girl-culture, their clubby skullduggery emasculated against the background of female rituals such as sleepovers, spa treatments, and bake-offs. In Braided Beard Madani envisions a barber shop as a setting for camped up erotica, with a hirsute bear-type getting a pampering session he didn’t bargain for. Madani replicates this melodramatic fussiness using her loose painting style as a key component of her epicene narrative: the elaborately patterned carpet and the man’s hairy legs point to a feminine eye for detail and decoration and the hamfisted clumsiness of its male approximation.
Two Pillows and a Bolster devises a "slap-and-tickle" approach to formal painting. Picturing a man lying across a bed with his unwound turban suggesting the final stages of seduction, the visual clues to his wantonness lie in the painting’s composition rather than its image: the mattress and pillows form a female torso, the man’s body creates an immodest shape and angle. Rendered in the muted tones of soft-porn, Madani’s muse resolves as a lusty wannabe centrefold, or more comically, a frustrated and repressed depiction of a quiet night in for one.
Madani’s recurring cake motif was inspired by a child’s birthday party she witnessed in Tehran, where the festive celebrations seemed to incongruously include businessmen, a PA system and American coloured decorations. This mosh-up of signifiers suggested an interesting parallel for the act of painting itself, conceiving the canvas as a site of contradiction, invention, and fantasy. Pink Cake captures this ambience of surrealism in both its subject and style with her cake-laden brief-clad machismos elucidated by luscious and intuitional mark-making, jumbling delicate washes and fluid lines with glutinous impastos of intoxicatingly saccharine hues.
As a painter, Madani has been compared to Matisse because of her use of pure colours, geometric compositions and expressive patterning. In contrast with her controversial subject matter, her large paintings are self-consciously aesthetic, borrowing from the ‘feminine’ styles and tones of printed fabrics. In Elastic Pink, her troops of parachuters are barely recognisable; instead their trademark brown and pink bodies become an abstract design focusing concentration on the painting’s construction. Each splotch of colour reverberates with energy as brush marks bleed between opaque and transparent to reveal minute details scratched into the surface. Compositionally dividing the canvas into two parts, Madani gives the impression of movement, like two panes of a comic or frames of film.
In Pose Madani’s beefy terrorist strikes a classic pin-up posture, farcically boasting his recent body waxing as a hero’s survival of exquisite torture. Executed with the apocalyptic glow of sunset exotica, Madani stages his glory with a clichéd romanticism redolent of Hollywood film posters or Gauguin’s Tahitian virgins. Traces of her casual brush strokes give the scene a languid dreamy effect, her sharp dabs, replicating oozing blood and plucked hairs, punctuating the canvas’s serene surface with exaggerated cartoon severity.
Madani’s Withered is from a series of paintings exploring men’s sexuality. Transplanting the metaphor of the female ‘garden’ to the realm of masculinity, Madani’s balding blokes are confounded by the flourish of greenery sprouting from their pants, only to face the further social embarrassment of botanical wilting at an inopportune moment. Similar to her cake paintings, Madani’s horticulture theme is conceived as a sub-cultural activity rife with macho-ego, sexual innuendo, and competitive violence.
Madani’s paintings substitute slap-stick comedy for violence, drawing from the conventions of comic book illustration where hyperbolised stories and exaggerated forms become allegories for complex social issues. In Ice Cream pink and brown paint rolls down the canvas, the strawberry-chocolate colours of Neapolitan gelato conjuring Mafioso affiliation, its sickly sweet gore transforming blood bath to festive delight. Madani renders the men’s faces as drawings within a drawing, heightening the simple two dimensionality of their farcical world and making reference to both balaclavas and women’s veils.
Themes of gender and social inequality are predominant in Ahmad Morshedloo’s work. In Untitled, he presents these with an introspective grace in an intensely detailed study of a woman reclining. The quiet simplicity of his subject becomes the focus of expansive meditation as his dense cross-hatching and delicately tangled gestures transform the surface into a microcosm of wonder, infusing his cold clammy palette with a sense of secluded energy. Extreme foreshortening is one of the most difficult technical skills in drawing and Morshedloo uses this forced perspective to create a hesitancy or confusion within this image, which initially appears alien and abstract. The black mass at the centre of the panel is her hair, which should always be kept covered; according to Iranian tradition it is a source of female power.
Morshedloo’s canvases are disarming in their unassuming beauty. His paintings of people possess a mesmerising quality transforming the transient scenes of everyday street life to eternal moments of contemplation. Morshedloo develops his images with understated compositional devices which lend a sense of careful balance, both visually and psychologically. In Untitled, he uses the contrast of both tone and subject matter to create an underlying tension. The black robed women float weightlessly against the sun-bleached background, the abstracted negative space of their drapery forming a surreal juxtaposition to the men’s leisurely nakedness. The canvas is cropped at the left edge with a trompe l’oiel wall which does not fit as part of the scene but rather operates as a metaphorical barrier, the hooked chain which hangs on it symbolising oppression and temptation.
In documenting contemporary Iranian society, Morshedloo considers his role as an artist as a tremendous responsibility and he approaches his paintings with both humility and criticality. Central to his practice is the notion of the subjectivity of the artist’s vision. In Untitled his use of a variety of painterly styles insinuates both the public attitude towards and the personal consciousness of his subjects, with the man realistically represented in the centre, surrounded by women in various states of dissolve. Morshedloo articulates their faces with astonishing faithfulness giving each figure a sense of individual strength and dignity.
Sara Rahbar’s work draws from her own experiences of being an Iranian-American citizen to question issues of nationalism, identity, and the perceptions of cultural difference. Her Flag #19 Memories Without Recollection is an American flag made up of fragments of Persian fabrics. Ragged and worn and adorned with military medals and tassels, this piece poignantly bridges two cultures, weaving together elements rich with suggestive and symbolic histories in protest against the current wars. Rahbar, who is well known as an educator and activist as well as an artist, sees her work as a way to encourage unity and tolerance between people irrespective of political, religious, racial, and economic backgrounds. She explains: “we are all made up of the same fibre, in the end we are all human”.
Marwan Rechmaoui is a Lebanese artist whose work often deals with themes of urban development and social history. His Beirut Caoutchouc is a large black rubber floor mat in the shape of Beirut’s current map. Embossed in precise detail with roads and byways and segmented into 60 individual pieces demarcating neighbourhoods, Rechmaoui’s installation scrutinises the physical and social formation of one of the world’s most conflicted cities. Through this piece, Rechmaoui highlights these divisions to question the underlying causes and consequences of cultural difference, affiliation, and identity, and explore how the city’s troubled history has both impacted and shaped the everyday lives of its inhabitants.
Spectre (The Yacoubian Building, Beirut) is an exact replica of Rechmaoui’s former apartment building. The building was evacuated in 2006 during the military conflict with Israel, and is presented as eerily vacant, signifying the abrupt end of its use and the abandoned lives of its inhabitants. Made from concrete and glass, held together by grout and thin wooden strips, the structure subtly buckles and warps in a precarious balance. Details such as shop front signs and colourful house-proud doors barred behind security screens point to a once vibrant community and its deterioration, evidencing the cultural, political and economic shifts that transform locality and mark an increasingly unstable and anxious relationship to place. |
