Ramin Haerizadeh / Rokni Haerizadeh / Hesam Rahmanian Slice A Slanted Arc Into Dry Paper Sky** 21.02.–17.05.2015

Al Barsha Street in Dubai is where the three Iranian artists Ramin Haerizadeh (*1975), Rokni Haerizadeh (*1978) and Hesam Rahmanian (*1980) currently live. It is an extraordinary villa full of things, a studio, a stage, a film set and movie theatre; it is a cabinet of curiosity, a test site-cum-monastery, an academy-cum-pleasure dome. The house informs their art as it results from both collective and individual endeavor—something that becomes immediately palpable when one steps into their exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich.

Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian work both individually and in collaboration, but do not form a collective. Their art translates into multiple forms — films, installations, artworks and exhibitions—and often evolves around friends, other artists or people they meet by chance. This includes Iranian artist Niyaz Azadikhah and her sister, a DJ, Nesa Azadikhah, Iranian sculptor Bita Fayyazi, polyglot writer Nazli Ghassemi, American artist Lonnie Holley, gallery manager Minnie McIntyre, Iranian graphic designer and artist Iman Raad, Maaziar Sadr, who works for a telecommunications company in the Emirates, Tamil friends Edward St and Indrani Sirisena. Sometimes these people occupy central roles, sometimes they are marginal, but in either case they bring with them a reality that interrupts the trio’s universe and language, and channels their—and our—attention in unexpected territories. Another important strategy in their practice is the inclusion of various artistic worlds that are as respectfully acknowledged as they are shamelessly appropriated and adapted. This ranges from artworks and objects held in their own private collection to broader aspects of Iranian culture. Confronted with their projects, their thinking and art-making, one can learn a great deal about how Iranian artists have absorbed modernity—how, for instance, filmmakers, cartoonists and artists such as , , Mahmoud Khan Saba, Kam- ran Shirdel, or Noureddin Zarrinkelk combined Persian culture with Western influences and vernacular traditions. One realises that there is another chapter of (dissident) modernity yet to be written. These are some of the main ingredients to the exhibition, which transforms Kunsthalle Zürich into their house to offer us the trio’s artistic universe through films, wall paintings, sound, a new floor, and an eclectic collection of their and other artists’ works. Just like Al Barsha Street, Kunsthalle Zürich will be the center of a centrifugal world where divergent directions (and laughter) abound, and where one starts to wonder how it is all held together. Through aesthetics, one could argue, through the languages that they develop (and are still developing), and through that thing called art, which, in their case, is of stunning precision and craft backed up by broad, passionate, and generously shared knowledge. This makes their collaboration a model for how to approach a multi-directional, if not multi-chaotic, world as well as an art institution like Kunsthalle Zürich.

Slice A Slanted Arc Into Dry Paper Sky is the first institutional exhibition of the trio in Europe.

** From the poem “I Still Think About That Crow” written by Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlu in homage to , considered the father of modern Persian poetry. Translated from Farsi in collaboration with Christopher Lord as part of the trio’s Unfaithful Poem Project.

Kunsthalle Limmatstrasse 270 Zürich CH–8005 Zürich Publication

The first monograph on the artists’ collaboration will be published in cooperation with Kunst- halle Zürich and the Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai. Ramin Haerizadeh Rokni Haerizadeh Hesam Rahmanian. Edited by Tina Kukielski. Co-edited by Christopher Lord. Published on the occasion of the exhibition Slice A Slanted Arc Into Dry Paper Sky at Kunsthalle Zürich, February 21–May 17, 2015. Texts by Tina Kukielski, Daniel Baumann and Christopher Lord. Translation by Nazli Ghassemi. Design by Ghazaal Vojdani. Kunsthalle Zürich, Mousse Publishing, Milan 2015. ISBN 9788867491353. Works by other artists

The private collection of Ramin und Rokni Haerizadeh is part of this exhibition. Works by the following artists are exhibited:

• Polly Apfelbaum (*1955), American artist using painting to investigate spaces. • Sadie Benning (*1973), American artist and filmmaker, founding member of the feminist punk band Le Tigre. • Jake and Dinos Chapman (*1966 / *1962), British artists known for their irreverent use of art, tradition and themes. • Nicole Eisenman (*1965), American painter who had a solo show at Kunsthalle Zürich in 2007. • Bita Fayyazi (*1962), Iranian artist working in a performative and markedly social practice. • Gorilla Girls, a feminist collective established in 1985 in New York criticizing the art world’s sexism and racism. • Mona Hatoum (*1952), artist and filmmaker of Palestinian origin. • Lonnie Holley (*1950), Afro-American artist, performer and musician who collaborated with Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian. • Mehdi Hosseini (*1943), Iranian draftsman and painter who, after studying in the US, moved back to where he lives and teaches today. • Daniel Johnston (1961), American artist and musician, admired by Kurt Cobain. • Mike Kelley (1954–2012), influential American artist and art writer. • RB Kitaj (1932–2007), American artist of Jewish origins living mostly in Great Britain. Here, a selection of silkscreens on important books (from In Our Time: Covers for a Small Library After the Life for the Most Part, 1969 / 1970) is shown. • Farshid Maleki (*1943), Iranian artist and important teacher to a younger generation, among them Rokni Haerizadeh. • Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989), famous and controversial American photographer. • Jessica Mein (*1975), Brazilian artist living in Dubai. • Ardeshir Mohasses (1938–2008), popular Iranian illustrator and widely respected caricatur- ist. Died in poverty in New York in 2008. • Bahman Mohasses (1932–2010), considered the father of modern Iranian art. • In 1963 he staged Eugen Ionesco’s The Chairs. Among other things he translated works by Italo Calvino, Jean Genet and Luigi Pirandello into Farsi. From 1955 on he mostly lived in . • Tahminal Monazavi (*1988), Iranian artist, photographer and documentary film maker living in Iran. • Ahmad Amin Nazar (*1955), studied fine art in . After eight years in Cologne, Germany, where he joined the Society of Painters of Cologne and was widely exposed to Western art, returned to Iran. Upon his return, he began exploring relationships between miniaturist traditions and Iranian literature, and went on to develop a masterful skill of drawing. Due to ideological, political, cultural and violent turmoil he has become profoundly reclusive. • Alice Nikitinova (*1979), Czech painter and photographer who had a show in Zürich at BolteLang in 2010. • Nicky Nodjoumi (*1942), educated in Iran and the United States, is a politically engaged artist living in the United States. • Nam June Paik (1932–2006), Korean / American artist and pioneer of video art and perfor- mance. • Gertrud Quastler (1909–1963), American artist born in Austria. Here, rarely shown drawings are exhibited. • Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (*1924), Iranian artist and early collector of Iranian folk art. • Judith Shae (*1948), American sculptor living in New York. • Kiki Smith (*1954), American artist living in New York. • Sue Williams (*1954), American painter, whose work is regularly shown at Gallery Eva Presenhuber in Zurich. • Martha Wilson (*1947), American dancer, feminist and co-funder of Franklin Furnace Archive exhibition space in New York. Films

Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, Hesam Rahmanian Night Of Another Spring, 2013–2014, 22 min. 42 sec. Courtesy the artists

In 2012, the artists improvised and shot Jean Genet’s The Maids in their living room. This led to a fascination with the struggle of love and hate between Genet’s Madame and her servants that addresses how the powerless take on the worst characteristics of their oppressors in an act of mimicry. The similarity between a portrait of Marie Antoinette and a friend of the artists’ was the starting point for Night Of Another Spring. Fragments of The Green Automobile by Allen Ginsberg are heard as Madame is escorted to an exhibition by her butler and a fan-waving servant. She has her photograph taken with the artworks, and after a sacrificial feast, meets her buxom lady-in-waiting who both flatters and teases her. We hear a poem by Forough Farrokhzad while Madame gives birth to a pig. She vigorously washes black paint from her courtier’s head, torments her butler with sit-ups and picks a flower to slip in her corset. She is consequently tried by a judge and condemned to death. Later, her courtiers eat pizza, and Madame’s severed head is on the table.

Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, Hesam Rahmanian Chai-e Iran, 2013–2014, 26 min. 39 sec. Courtesy the artists

The artists found a cheap tea caddy decorated with a painted scene of a veiled tea picker standing in an idyllic, serene tea field. The video imagines the life of this tea picker, as seen through the melodramatic, dance-orientated lens of a Film Farsi—a Bollywood-like pop cinema that proliferated before 1979 and is today largely remembered with syrupy nostalgia or dis- missed as an immoral relic. Like any true Film Farsi tragedy, the lead in Chai-e Iran moves from humble obscurity to stardom before she meets an inevitable death. After being woken by a cockerel, and leaving her dear mother for the tea fields, the tea picker dreams of buying tea from a supermarket. Two horsemen arrive and attempt to woo the tea picker, occasionally lifting her dress. She meets with her lover, an intellectual, before she is taken to dance for an amorous khan, a wealthy landowner. The tea picker remains faithful to the intellectual, however, and they marry. The tea picker listens to her husband reading and her clothes change to that of a political activist. During a protest, she knocks a soldier’s hat off and wields a traffic cone before her death by shooting is caught on camera in a moment eerily similar to the tragic fate of Neda Agha-Soltan, killed during the 2009 post-election demonstrations in Tehran.

Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, Hesam Rahmanian O, You People!, 2014, 93 min. Courtesy the artists

O, You People! records a two-week-long ritual on a stilted boathouse in the Gulf of Mexico. The work started with a poem by Nima Yushij, widely regarded as the initiator of modern poetry in Iran. Yushij’s O You People! (Ay Adam-ha) describes a man thrashing about in the surf as he drowns, calling out to well-fed bathers relaxing on the shore. In the video, male and female voice-overs are heard reading an “unfaithful” version of the poem: The original was translated word-by-word from Farsi to English by a bilingual speaker, then put back together as a poem by an English-speaking writer in collaboration with the trio. Ramin, Rokni and Hesam rose every morning at 4 am, and filmed each other moving around the boat-house until sunrise — sniffing the floorboards, offering their nipples to the wooden railings, pointing to an unseen point in the sea. Occasionally the spoken words of the poem mirror the artists’ gestures, but the solemnity of the text is constantly undercut by the absur- dity of the movements on screen. The color the artists wear indicates the day of the week that the performance took place on: yellow for Sunday, green for Monday, red for Tuesday, blue for Wednesday, brown for Thursday, white for Friday and black for Saturday.

Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, Hesam Rahmanian Foolad, 2014–2015, 19 min. 30 sec. Courtesy the artists

“Foolad” means steel in Farsi. The work begins like a hard-boiled anti-hero movie: A woman in a cat suit walks through the streets at dawn, holding two pistols. After entering the artists’ home, she “fights” a series of banal stock characters and stereotypes that are defeated by being transformed into domestic products like a blender and a vacuum cleaner. One of the de- feated combatants puts on an afro wig, initiating an impromptu rave. Afterwards, the cat-suit- ed woman lies sleeping, as her former opponents stand around her body plotting to rape her. The soundtrack includes excerpts of the video game Tekken, early animations by Noureddin Zarrinkelk, an improvised composition by Nesa Azadikhah, John Cage’s The Choral Works (I) and Pianos and Voices by John Cage and Meredith Monk.

Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, Hesam Rahmanian Aakkaandi, 2014–2015, 33 min. 37 sec. Courtesy the artists

A pig-faced tourist-curator clutching a tote bag visits a tailoring shop to get a new dress cop- ied. A doctor and his violently shushing nurse administer everything from injections to dental reconstruction. Shots of a stunned bird reawakening are accompanied by a Gurulu mask dance. Improvised with Indrani Sirisena and Edward St, who live and work at the villa that the artists share, these short, simple vignettes are interspersed with the couple’s recollections of the Sri Lankan Civil War and the political machinations that stoked the conflict. The work culminates in a collaboratively painted canvas that they steadily layer with Tamil lettering. Several sections of Aakkaandi were filmed by Edward St. Many of the images in this video are inspired by the works of Tamil poets, particularly The Aakkaandi Bird by Shanmugam Sivalingam and 21 May 1986 by R. Cheran.

Rokni Haerizadeh Reign of Winter, 2012–2013, silent, 8 min. 43 sec. Courtesy the artists

Reign of Winter debuted at the 2013 Carnegie International and takes on the subject of the British royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton to transform this globally broad- casted ritual of glamour, happiness and royal power into a sarcastic, Animal Farm-like, uncanny fairytale. The point of departure for Reign of Winter was a film on YouTube, which was downloaded, then sequenced into several thousand images, painted over frame by frame by the artist laying the movement of drawing and painting on top of the film’s own movement.

Rokni Haerizadeh Letter!, 2014, color, silent, 6 min. 32 sec. Courtesy the artists

Similar to Reign of Winter, YouTube is the point of departure for Letter! The scenes used by the artists show protests by Femen, a radical feminist group founded 2008 in Ukraine and now based in Paris. Femen became famous for their topless protest against sexism, religious institutions or homophobia. Once downloaded from YouTube, the films where sequenced into several thousand images, painted over frame by frame by the artist to lay the movement of drawing, painting and letters on top of the film›s own movement. TV above the cashier and reception shows excerpts from the following Iranian movies

Masoud Kimiai (*1941) Title sequence (with tattoos) of his film Qeysar, 1969

According to Wikipedia, “the film was considered a‚ landmark in the Iranian cinema and led to a new trend for brooding noir dramas in which outraged family honour is avenged.” Title sequence by young Abbos Kiarostami.

Bijan Mofid (1935-1984) Excerpt of the play Shahr-e Qesseh / City of Tales, 1968

Shahr-e Qesseh / City of Tales is a satire and musical play using elements of Iranian folklore. First performed at Shiraz Festival in 1968 in the presence of the queen, this bold and acid critique of modern Iranian society shocked the Iranian theater world. It is one of the most idiosyncratic and beloved theatrical productions in Iranian history.

Ali Hatami (1944–1996) Hassan Kachal, 1970

Persian movie by Iranian filmmaker Ali Hatami, inspired by Iranian folk tales and reputed as the first Iranian musical movie. The title sequence is based on a classic coffee house painting, which was used to publicly tell stories in front of an audience at a coffee house. The painting by Abbas Bolukifar (1924–2000) installed above the TV is such classic coffee house painting. TV on the bench in the entrance

Noureddin Zarrinkelk (*1937) Prince Amir-Hamzeh, 1977 The Mad, Mad, Mad World, 1975 Super Powers, 1982 Association Of Ideas, 1973

All four films are by Noureddin Zarrinkelk, an artist, graphic designer and photographer also known as the father of animation in Iran. Zarrinkelk founded the first School for Animation in Iran. Theory & Programs

Artist talk with Daniel Baumann (Director). In English • Tuesday, February 24, 6.30-7.30 pm, free entry Living together, it is often said, in an eccentric house in Dubai, lies at the heart of Ramin Haerizadeh’s, Rokni Haerizadeh’s and Hesam Rahmanian’s collaborative work. Conviviality and conversation then provide specific access to their and multi-facetted aesthetic and critical discourse. This evening with the artists promises to be precisely that: generously anecdotal, intensively colloquial and spontaneously flamboyant. Guided Tours With Daniel Baumann (Director) • 25.02. / 15.04. 12.30–1.30 pm With Arthur Fink ( Independent Curator and Art Historian) • 12.03. / 30.04., 6–7 pm With Yannic Joray (Artist and Curator) • 22.03. / 17.05., 2–3 pm Free entry. Languages flexible

Family Afternoons Sundays, 2–3.30 pm, with Brigit Meier (Art Educator) • March 29 / April 12 Book TV

Books presentation and public TV-recording (English), a project by Géraldine Beck #04 Vincent de Roguin: Illisibilismes – Observations on Esoteric Christianity, Hair Metal and War Propaganda #05 Luca Beeler: Children’s Books • Friday, April 10, 5–6 pm Book TV is a web project recorded in public, which aims to present selected printed matter. This first event at Kunsthalle Zürich introduces episodes #04 and #05. Vincent de Roguin is an artist based in Geneva and will speak about the migration of selected ideas and symbols, connecting Christian hermeticism, underground music and war propaganda iconography. After a short break Zurich based art historian and curator Luca Beeler will look at artist pub- lications catered to future generations - such as the ones by El Lissitzky, Andy Warhol, John Armleder, and Tana Hoban, among others.

Opening Hours Tue / Wed / Fri 11 am–6 pm, Thu 11 am–8 pm, Sat / Sun 10 am–5 pm, Mon closed Public holidays: April 3 / April 5 / May 5 / May 14, 10 am–5 pm

Please also consult the up-to-date information on our website www.kunsthallezurich.ch

Kunsthalle Zürich receives generous funding from: