Kunsthalle Zürich Limmatstrasse 270 CH–8005 Zürich Ramin
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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 Ardeshir Mohasses, Ali Hatami, 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 Nima Yooshij, 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 Iran 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 Rome. • Tahminal Monazavi (*1988), Iranian artist, photographer and documentary film maker living in Iran. • Ahmad Amin Nazar (*1955), studied fine art in Tehran. 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.