An Iranian Jeff Wall?

Mitra Tabrizian's first solo show at Leila Heller Gallery runs through July 7.

City, London 2008, 2008, C-type photographic print, 48 x 98.5 in / 122 x 250 cm, Edition of 5, 2 APs, Image courtesy Leila Heller Gallery

Dissecting Mitra Tabrizian’s Politically Incisive Photo Tableaux

by Kyle Chayka, Artinfo

At first glance, British-Iranian photographer and videographer Mitra Tabrizian’s photographs, currently on view at Leila Heller gallery in Chelsea, look very familiar. The stiff postures of her subjects and the strictly horizontal, minimally obtrusive perspective of her camera lens is straight out of the Jeff Wall textbook, while her touch of surrealism and the sense of a movie scene stopped in motion comes from Wall, Philip Lorca diCorcia, and Gregory Crewdson. What sets this tight selection of Tabrizian’s images apart from its numerous influences is its cross-cultural, politically aware subject matter rather than its aesthetic execution.

Tabrizian shoots in both England and Iran, offering a series of desolate landscapes. She focuses in on Leicestershire, a county in the English Midlands, depicting a quartet of ruined warehouses and empty factory buildings. In one shot, a single suited gentleman, Middle Eastern in appearance, stands in profile in front of a grid of mossy windows. The combination of polished, besuited businessman and crumbling industrial decay is incongruous, and feels unexpectedly sad. Rather than mournful, “City, London” (2008), a collection of bankers gathered in the austerely marbled lobby of some anonymous office building, has an air of vague foreboding. The grey gradient of suited men stand to attention but their gazes never meet one another’s, or anything, for that matter. They look, perhaps, like they’re shiftlessly dodging the blame for the global economic collapse.

The photographer’s subjects are creepy because of their apathy. Though posed in emphatic, stolid stances, Tabrizian’s people are passive: They aren’t in the middle of completing any specific action or participating in a visible narrative, as they often are in Wall or Crewdson’s work. In “Tehran 2006” a crowd of bystanders carrying briefcases, grocery bags, and other signifiers of everyday life cross a sparse landscape with high-rise buildings and political murals in the background. “Untitled” (2009) pictures a group of black-clothed figures marching through a desert road like refugees.

Read in the context of the current political climate, Tabrizian’s work seems to be about decay, both in the physical sense and the spiritual one. The bankers stand around idly while the economy plunges, the original means of production in dissarray. The Iran photos point to the humanity-dulling, oppressive conditions of an entrenched dictatorship. If the style of her photos is familiar, then her content is at least more critically engaged with the trials of its time than the work of other set-up photographers. Though they lack the clean intensity of Wall’s semiotic puzzles, Tabrizian’s work has a broader worldview.

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Mitra Tabrizian - Photographs

Tabrizian creates fabricated mise-en-scenes. Bankers in an office building, women walking through Tehran’s surrounding mountains, a man standing on the sidewalk—nothing seems out of the ordinary—yet Tabrizian stages these evocative scenes as if we are walking in on the subjects mid-scene, immediately before or after the climax of the narrative. Often the images appear cold or even disturbing in large part due to the utter disconnect between the characters. For instance, in City, London 2009, we see several men in black and grey business suits inside the lobby of an office building. Indeed nothing out of the ordinary; however, there is no interaction between the characters. They each stand and stare in different directions, completely disconnected from each other and the backdrop that surrounds them.

In the brochure essay accompanying the exhibition, Vali Mahlouji, a London-based independent curator and writer, writes, “When figures appear in groups, Tabrizian’s meticulous compositional juxtapositions and directorial interventions ensure an even more acute sense of dissociation and dislocation. Where expectation is congruency and relatedness, actors remain hermitically solitary. Despite co-habiting a particular and shared fragment of space, the protagonists remain resolutely detached, disunited and scattered.” 

Beyond Tabrizian’s emphasis on the placement of her subjects, the landscape often plays the secondary character in her photographs. Whether it’s a kitchen, an office building, or the desert of Tehran, the backdrop always lends to further characterize her subjects and to enhance the work’s narrative.

In her newest series, “Leicestershire 2012,” Tabrizian documents the deteriorating factories of the city of Leicester. In this series, the landscape of the city, rather than the subject, takes center stage. A man makes an appearance in a few of the images—but his solo presence seems only to emphasize the eerie desertion of the city. In Leicestershire 2012, the man stands in a suit by a canal in front of a boarded up, now defunct building. His eyes are closed as if mourning for or perhaps remembering a town which once was.

Mitra Tabrizian, born in Tehran, Iran, lives and works in London. She has exhibited widely in major international museums and galleries, including her solo exhibition at the Tate Britain in 2008. One of her portraits will be on view during the London Olympics as part of the exhibition The World in London, a public art program celebrating the 204 participating nations, with 204 portraits by London and international artists on view across the city. Her most recent book, Another Country, published by Hatje Cantz in 2012, includes texts by Homi Bhabha, David Green, and Hamid Naficy. Her photographic and film works are represented in major public collections, including: Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Australia; Moderna Mussset, Stockholm; Musée d’Art Moderne, Luxembourg; amongst others. She has received several photography and film awards, including the British Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) Innovation Award for the film The Predator (28 min., 35 mm print, 2004).

 Leicestershire 2012, 2012, C-type photographic print, 71 x 48 in / 181.5 x 12 2cm, Edition of 5, 2 APs, Image courtesy Leila Heller Gallery 

Leicestershire 2012, 2012, C-type photographic print, 62 x 48 in / 158.5 x 122 cm, Edition of 5, 2 APs, Image courtesy Leila Heller Gallery

Leicestershire 2012, 2012, C-type photographic print, 61 x 48 / 156 x 122 cm, Edition of 5, 2 APs, Image courtesy Leila Heller Gallery

Leicestershire 2012, 2012, C-type photographic print, 61 x 48 in / 155 x 122 cm, Edition of 5, 2 APs, Image courtesy Leila Heller Gallery

Tehran 2006, 2006, C-type light jet print, 40 x 119 in / 101 x 302 cm, Edition of 5, 2 APs, Image courtesy Leila Heller Gallery

Untitled 2009, 2009, C-type photographic print, 42 x 121 in / 107 x 308 cm, Edition of 5, 2 APs, Image courtesy Leila Heller Gallery

Via Leila Heller Gallery and Artinfo