Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, Hesam Rahmanian
How exquisite this darkness is, how vivid its brilliance, and how piercing its light!, 2024
acrylic, gesso and epoxy on waterproof MDF boards
630 x 500 cm
Courtesy of the artists and Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna
This painting explores the concept of "black light" in Islamic philosophy, featuring Arabic letters as brushstrokes that inscribe quotes from Ibn Arabi and Ayn al-Quzat Hamadani. These texts are about seeking to see beyond the visible and uncover deeper truths in darkness as the letters morph into fantastical creatures inspired by the 13th-century text Aja’ib al-Makhluqat (Wonders of Creatures), which depicts the geography and imaginative beliefs of the desert. The painting carries us over war-wounded Mesopotamian marshlands and regions scarred by oil exploration, sweeping us to a gulf shore where tourists’ bodies, like tofu in the wind of progress, are crisped by the sun. Strange creatures, whose bones are Arabic letters, ride on outstretched fingers, embodying the people on the move.
Rooted in the artists’ collective memory and the exiled literature of authors like Shahriar Mandanipour and Gholam-Hossein Sa'edi, the work encapsulates the weight of exile and the resilience of memory, highlighting a quote: “I live in a two-by-two-metre room. Every time I enter, I feel that I wear this room instead of my overcoat.”
The act of concealing the body in a bunker or being restricted in exile drives the use of “Dastgah”, a self-designed strategy involving a wearable container that minimizes and hides the artist's body, transforming it into a painting machine that restricts movement and obscures vision.
“Dastgah” allows the trio to detach from intentionality. Their preparation involved transforming their living space into a “strange room” filled with unsettling artefacts – family photos replaced by images of soldiers, chairs by wheelchairs, walls covered with life vests, and thermal blankets as curtains.
This constrained environment contributes to the development of wearable containers. This confinement highlights objects like Shia mourning items, jalabiya dresses, palm fronds, and oil pumps as essential elements of the painting machine, generating raw, primordial brushstrokes that the artists, like geomancers with brushes on sticks, later decode by using Arabic letters, which gradually morph into fantastical creatures.
Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian
From Sea to Dawn, 2016/17
single-channel colour video, no sound, 5:51 min.
Courtesy of the artists and Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna
From Sea to Dawn – an alternative take on the European refugee crisis – stages an intervention into photojournalistic images of the migrants where the refugees are viewed as a force of nature, bodies coming out of the water to cross Europe. The living and non-living morph into extraordinary entities reminiscent of human and non-human forms disobeying laws of physics — gravity, solidity and core, movement — coming together as a set of ambiguous elements in an unintelligible way. The artists negotiate these transformations using mirroring techniques inspired by Islamic cultural imagery, architecture and geometry. They redefine the body in a subverted context in contrast to the familiar media-framed images and analogy. This transformative gaze takes place in an indeterminate zone, where the rhythm and pulse of images awaken new sensations such that the body and nerves are drawn into an altered state of empathy in their experience of the refugee crisis. From Sea to Dawn is thus a “moving painting” — a montage where every single frame is an individual painting without tracing the movements of the source material. Through interruption and distortion, this work aims to transform and estrange the familiar to create an obstacle, make the viewer rethink the issue from a new standpoint and evoke different emotions.
In the art making of Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian, production is performance, and the performance is a collective action leading to dance, art, and politics. The trio investigates a model of how to collaborate, translating it into multiple forms which often evolve around artists and people from different walks of life. Through this body assembly, creating a self-sustaining creative life; how to build an aesthetic and undermine it; how to be politically acute and humorous, generous and eccentric.
Their work is often referred to as a landscape where the complex nature of processing is integrated into the nested system that forms the landscape of their practice. Their home is a working studio that is also a film set, a movie theatre, a museum and a research center. The house informs their art as it results from both collective and individual endeavour. The artists are not a distinct group or collective; there is no name or label for the trio, as their practice often evolves around other artists and friends.
Ramin Haerizadeh, born in 1975, Rokni Haerizadeh, born in 1978, both in Tehran/IR, and Hesam Rahmanian, born in 1980 in Knoxville/USA, currently live and work in Dubai/UAE.
