Art Aware: A question of politics

Dubai-based Iranian artist Ramin Haerizadeh uses a variety of materials to investigate contemporary global issues such as identity, gender, intolerance and political power games

Ramin Haerizadeh, First Rain's Always a Surprise, 2012-17. Courtesy Gulf News.

by Jyoti Kalsi, Gulf News

Ramin Haerizadeh’s work is playful, absurd and profound. His latest show, To Be or Not To Be, That is the Question. And Though, it Troubles the Digestion, features collages on paper and canvas that seem to be chaotic, crazy assemblages of images and objects, which have no connection with each other. But there is a method to the madness. By excavating, manipulating and juxtaposing the debris of all the imagery that surrounds us, the Dubai-based Iranian artist wants to investigate contemporary global issues such as identity, gender, cultural intolerance, media manipulation, political power games, migration, displacement, the Western gaze, and hegemonic ethics.

The title of the show is extracted from the poem, Children of the Age, by Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. The poem says that we are all children of a political age, and there is a political slant to all the things we do and say or abstain from doing and saying. It points out that in this age, even things such as crude oil and protein feed have political meaning. Hence, our existence, and every decision we make is a question of politics.

“Regardless of what we say or don’t say, do or don’t do, we cannot help being political. As an artist working in this region, I feel that the very act of making art is political. My work emerges from my daily activities as I perform different roles and take on different identities. I do not believe in preserving my old artworks. When they come back from exhibitions across the world, I start reworking them. Like human beings, they keep changing and evolving with time, acquiring new layers of experiences, emotions and memories. In my collages, I put unrelated things, people and events together to pose questions about their relationship, and to give information and tell stories, leaving it up to each viewer to process and read it in their individual context,” the artist says.

Haerizadeh has used a variety of materials to construct his complex narratives. These include photographs of himself playing different roles and identities, photographs he has shot around Dubai in shopping malls and on the Metro, media images of past and present conflicts, printed materials, used cardboard boxes, plastic packaging, old film posters, images of his earlier works, paintings by others, and objects such as souvenirs, plastic figurines, anatomic models, fake teeth and noses, a miniature Tabasco bottle, a polycarbonate chair with his photo printed on it, and a watermelon. He has manipulated the materials through repeated cycles of scanning, printing, collaging, re-photographing, re-printing, and again re-collaging them to bring all these unrelated elements together, mimicking the way we experience the world, and preserve, process and recall moments in our lives and the information overload all around us.

In one series of works, titled First Rain’s Always a Surprise, Haerizadeh has combined personal and collective stories by using photographs of his mother at different stages of her life alongside images of events happening in Iran and around the world in the same period.

“My mother belonged to the first generation of Iranian women allowed to study abroad. She went to boarding school in England when she was 13, and being away from home motivated her to start writing a diary and photographing herself to share her life with her family. This urge to capture her existence lasted throughout her life, so I have a huge archive of images documenting the journey of a woman from this region, who lived through war, revolution and the post-war period. I have deconstructed this journey by placing her photographs at different ages, with images of things that were happening at the same time, such as the women’s rights movement in the UK, the revolution in Iran, and the bombings during the war, to create a montage of the social, cultural and political milieu of the time,” Haerizadeh says.

In another series titled Still Life, the artist questions the subversion behind Western media images of the region, while also referencing classical Western still life painting in his humorous and irreverent style. In these collages, he has played with media images of the turmoil in the region to de-Westernise them. Adding another dimension to these works are still life arrangements of objects placed on tables protruding out from the collages, evoking the idea of the deliberate setting of a scene by an artist.

“I have observed that Western journalists tend to inject a Western aesthetic in their photographs, when covering events in this region, such as references to Goya’s paintings of war and Michelangelo’s Pieta. So, I took their images of the Arab Spring, the Syrian conflict and other events, and removed these Western references, while adding elements of mirroring and symmetry that reflect patterns in Islamic art and architecture,” he says.

Each artwork in this series is a mish-mash of images from the past and present that allude to different themes and issues, such as a bombed dentist’s clinic in Syria, a baby recovered from the rubble of the earthquake in Nepal, the protestors in Egypt’s Tahrir Square, women pearl divers in Japan, male pearl divers in the Gulf region, reproductions of Western still life paintings by a Chinese artist, pictures of Haerizadeh in different garbs, and even stamps describing different kinds of meat from a butchery. They are coupled with arrangements of objects such as candles and fake fruits and vegetables. The suggestion is that the collages are still life arrangements of the 24/7 news media — put on pause.

In other works, the artist has inserted images of himself acting out different roles within photographs of familiar places to comment on subjects such as contemporary consumer culture, Western perceptions of the Orient, gender roles in a patriarchal society, and his unpleasant experience with a bank. In a signature touch, he has included the entire words of the poem that inspired the title and theme of this show, in some of the artworks. However, they are hidden in places such as under the apron he wears in his avatar as a housewife in her kitchen, or below a flap in a figure in the mall.