Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam
Rahmanian, with writings by Vali Mahlouj
Until 21 May 2012
Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde
Al Quoz 1, Street 8
Al Serkal Avenue #13
Dubai, UAE
P.O. Box 18217
T + 971 (0)4 323 5052
info [at] ivde.net
Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde is delighted to present I Put It There, You Name It, for which the Haerizadeh brothers and Rahmanian, in a departure from the formalized structures associated with the presentation of contemporary art, create an ambience of collective inspirations, where productivity and ownership become meaningless, or malleable. In a continuation of the Haerizadeh brothers’ Art Berlin Contemporary show—for which they concentrated their studio into the size of the anticipated fair booth, and then transposed the resulting environment to the fair—they reveal, with Hesam Rahmanian, their creative sanctum.
“Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian, co-habitants and co-exhibitors, appropriate the gallery space into their personal domestic environment and create a replica of home. Interconnected rooms are stage sets. Coveted art works, collected over the years, by artists including Louise Bourgeois, David Hockney, Bahman Mohassess, Jake and Dinos Chapman, mingle with their own artworks, found objects and possessions in exact replication of home.
“These artworks, relics, and objects, accumulated, amassed and organised through time, are placed and displayed in apparent arbitrariness. The parts are intertwined, shortening and lengthening experience. There are no clear delineations, categorizations. Deliberately, there are no boundaries, or hierarchies. Dramatic meetings are being pushed. Individual distinctions are overshadowed. Fragments must be considered in their function predominantly in relation to the spatial totality. A consciousness of the spatial totality considers the object as an integral part of it.”
–Vali Mahlouji
The Haerizadeh brothers, exiled since 2009, have been working on individual and collaborative projects for many years, previously in Tehran and now in Dubai. Hesam Rahmanian, a childhood friend of the brothers, left Iran to study in the USA before joining them here in Dubai. Each of the three artists continues to work on individual projects, driven by deeply personal obsessions and cultures.
Ramin Haerizadeh
Ramin Haerizadeh (b. 1975, Tehran) works in a variety of media to create multiple reproductions of himself as a lone, bearded, veiled, cross-dressed creature. This chaos of appearances emphasizes a fractured self in a culture of concealment, serving as both a metaphor for oppression and a container of safety. The artist depends on humourous juxtapositions and candy-soft background colours to contain and camouflage the grotesque absurdity of the exposed internal conflicts, highlighting the schism between the individual’s internal and external realities.
Rokni Haerizadeh
The works of Rokni Haerizadeh (b. 1978, Tehran), ranging from painting to collage, sculpture, and animation, form a narrative that explores the extremities of human behaviour. He depicts a decadent world, exaggerated by a fantastical sense of the absurd, and amplified by his compelling and intrinsic manipulations of reality. He creates a controversial and disturbing narrative, a commedia dell’arte animated by the vocabulary of contemporary film, art, literature, and music. Each character in Haerizadeh’s narratives is the expression of a mood; frustration, desire, naivety, perversion, decency, violence, and shame reveal themselves through his painterly approaches. Instinctive desires and struggles are unleashed and challenged by Haerizadeh to emerge like castrated howls; Words are abandoned, and narratives materialize as disturbingly vivid collages of sensations and scenarios that repeat, evolve, regress, and re-emerge.
Hesam Rahmanian
Hesam Rahmanian (b.1980, USA) studied fine art in Tehran, followed by applied art and design in California. Upon moving to Dubai, he has immersed himself in visual art, focusing predominantly on painting, occasionally incorporating neon or challenging himself to projects with game pieces such as packs of playing cards or dice. Whichever process or medium Rahmanian engages, the final works emerge as reductive scenes in which entities stand alone. The solitary metaphors create an augmented sense of ultimate desolation while channeling an intense spectrum of inspirations and poignant human observations. Rahmanian’s works inherently integrate personal memories, obsessions and inspirations with astute social and political discourses relating to his native Iran and beyond.
