“I saw underneath the altar the souls of those who had been killed for the Word of God, and for the testimony of the Lamb which they had. They cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, Master, the holy and true, until you judge and avenge our blood on them who dwell on the earth?”
Revelation 6:9-10 THEM WHO DWELL ON THE EARTH REZA ARAMESH This haunting description of unbearably grim newspaper cuttings coming to life in a REZA ARAMESH: young boy’s gloomy bedroom in the dying days of the Second World War memorably articulates the power such images can have as they seep, unbidden, into the depths of our imagination, into the very dreams we dream. In his studio, Reza Aramesh has assembled his own wall of dreams – and nightmares – in which hastily snapped photographs of ‘THEM WHO DWELL the miserable victims of war and violence from 1950s Algeria and Korea to present-day Baghdad are juxtaposed with lavish art book illustrations of gilded statues of ecstatic saints and luminous paintings of the dead and dying Christ [Fig. 4]. This ambitious and challenging range of visual sources, from the journalistic and Contemporary to ON THE EARTH’ the grandest masters of Renaissance and Baroque art, resonates within and amongst Aramesh’s meticulously crafted photographic altarpieces and sensuously sculpted icons Geraldine A Johnson of beauty and terror. Aramesh’s art is an art of de-contextualisation and re-contextualisation, an art in which images and objects combine and recombine to form ever-shifting screens upon which we can project our own individual visual memories and personal experiences. Aramesh himself is as much a study in contrasts as are his works: born in small-town Iran, then [The boy] finds a pile of newspapers and magazines someone’s tied up and thrown trained at Goldsmiths College in the very heart of the London art world, Aramesh’s biography is as richly textured and varied as are the sources that have inspired him. over the fence. Now and then he opens a paper and sees a blinded prisoner of war In his art, the contrasts multiply before our eyes: East and West, past and present, sacred and secular, high art and mass culture, two and three-dimensional, colour and or a crying baby or some poor fleeing [refugee] running with a mattress across monochrome, death and life. To begin to unravel these intricately interwoven strands, one turns first to the titles given by Aramesh to his works. his back, and he’ll tear it out with care, take it to his private room and pin it to the Fig. 4: View inside Reza Aramesh’s London studio. In his most recent pieces, Aramesh has restricted his titles to a series of numbered flaky wall….at night those….starving weeping wounded on his walls wait till [he] ‘actions’ – one could also call them ‘interventions’ – in the process omitting the very precise labels given to earlier incarnations of his large-scale photographic re-enactments. is asleep and then they dance in their jagged borders….They never make a sound Previously, Aramesh used deliberately detailed, indeed, verbatim transcriptions of press photographs’ captions for his titles. By editing, recombining and then restaging these and he always sleeps through, but it happens all the same – men throw off their mass-media images with amateur actors in the opulent surroundings of grand European galleries and palaces, but keeping the original newspaper and magazine captions, mattresses and soldiers tear away bandages and the dead rise out of the ground… Aramesh’s photographs encouraged viewers to compare and contrast a particular journalistic source directly with his reimagined interpretation. Thus the subtitle for Tim Winton, Cloudstreet (1991). what is now simply called Action 111 – a scene performed in the magnificent halls of the Palace of Versailles – was initially the caption related to the bleak press photograph taken in the final months of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime that had inspired the group in the centre of the composition, a standing man contemplating a figure lying prone on the ground [Figs. 2 and 3].
But such an exact verbal quotation could distract from the fact that the striking figure in the left foreground of the triptych actually had been derived from a completely different mass-media image, this one focusing on a traumatised young boy on a rubble-strewn street in Fallujah nearly a year after the fall of the Iraqi dictator [Fig. 1]. By eliminating his earlier, seemingly straightforward link between text and image and now paring down the title to nothing more than Action 111, Aramesh allows his triptych to float free from any single, specific visual or historical referent. Instead, such imposing pieces tap into our gnawing sense of familiarity with the many hundreds, if not thousands of similarly excoriating images we see day in and day out in newspapers, on television and increasingly online. Today, it may be Iraq, but the images that inspire Aramesh also conjure up in our subconscious a veritable internal slide show of 20th and 21st-century Fig. 1: An Iraqi boy weeps as people survey the damage following an Fig. 2: Reza Aramesh, Action 111, 2010. Fig. 3: Dead prisoner outside Abu Ghraib grief and horror: Korea, Algeria, Vietnam, Palestine… air strike in Fallujah, Sept. 9, 2004. [photo: Fares Dlimi/AFP] prison, Oct. 20, 2002. [photo: Tyler Hicks/ The New York Times]
14 15 Fig. 11: Reza Aramesh, Action 67, 2010. Fig. 12: Caravaggio, Deposition of Christ, c.1602-4. [photo: The Yorck project/Wikimedia Commons]
Fig. 5: Some members of the Islamic fundamentalists were regrouped Fig. 6: Reza Aramesh, Action 124, 2011. Fig. 7: Diego Velázquez, Christ at the Column after the Flagellation, c.1628-29. [photo: Enrique northern Nigeria, July 27, 2009. Luis Cordero/Wikimedia Commons] [source photo: AFP, modified by Reza Aramesh]
The slideshow inside our heads is not limited to the cold shock of the new, but also the warm familiarity of the old: Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Bernini, Velázquez. The art of these and other Renaissance and Baroque masters seems to soak through the surfaces of Aramesh’s photographs and animate the very limbs of his sculptures. Like his journalistic sources, however, the relationship is complex and multilayered, much more than a clear-cut case of direct visual quotation from a single source. Thus Action 124 references a figure Aramesh has cropped from a press photograph of religious fundamentalists captured in present-day Nigeria, but also the pleading eyes and mouth of Bernini’s marble Proserpina and the bound wrists of Velázquez’s pitiful painted figure of Christ crumpled on the floor [Figs. 5-9]. For all the contemporaneity of Aramesh’s figure, half clad in The visual and iconographic density – and intensity – of Aramesh’s work goes literally a tracksuit bearing the ubiquitous triple stripes of the Adidas brand, its historical and from head to toe, embodied in every aspect of his pieces. In Action 105, for instance, the aesthetic allusions are far more than merely skin-deep. In fact, they transform the sculpture beautiful, but essentially disempowered figure of a lithe young man instantly recalls for into a timeless icon that is no longer beholden to any single image, place or date: black the art historian almost innumerable Renaissance and Baroque images of St Sebastian, skin turns to white, female metamorphises into male, and shackles disappear, even as an bound to a tree trunk whilst his pristine body is pieced by cruel arrows, or Christ himself, intense psychology of fear and subjugation remains [Fig. 10]. humiliatingly tied to a column, about to be mercilessly flagellated [Figs. 15 and 16]. But Aramesh, inspired by a major 2009-10 exhibition in London and Washington of Spanish Baroque art entitled The Sacred Made Real, has also cited somewhat less obvious sources for this piece, such as the imploring upward gaze of Francisco Antonio Ruiz Gijón’s St. John of the Cross, like Aramesh’s figure, a carefully crafted and convincingly painted wooden sculpture, albeit of an aging saint rather than a youthful captive [Figs. 17 and 18] (Velázquez’s Christ at the Column and Fernández’s Dead Christ were likewise encountered by Aramesh when visiting this powerful and very moving exhibition [see Figs. 7 and 13]).
Fig. 8: Gianlorenzo Bernini, Pluto and Proserpina (detail), 1621-22. Fig. 9: Reza Aramesh, Action 124 (detail). Fig. 10: Reza Aramesh, Action 124 (detail). [photo: Wikimedia Commons]
Likewise, Aramesh’s Action 67 and Action 87, imposing black-and-white photographs staged in the lavish surroundings of London’s Kenwood House and the Rodin Museum in Paris, are reenactments of mass-media images, the former of a wounded Somali man spirited away by his comrades in 2009, the latter of a victim of the Franco-Algerian conflict being mourned in 1958. But they also evoke art historical sources both painted and sculpted, from the bruised, bloody and gradually putrefying figure of the dead Christ carved by the Spanish Baroque sculptor Gregorio Fernández to depictions by painters such as Raphael, Pontormo and Caravaggio of Christ’s equally lifeless body moments after it has been lowered from the Cross [Figs. 11-14]. Fig. 13: Gregorio Fernández, Dead Christ, 1625-30. [photo: Rodelar/ Fig. 14: Reza Aramesh, Action 87, 2010. Wikimedia Commons]
16 17 Fig. 19: South Vietnamese soldiers show off a Fig. 20: Reza Aramesh, Action 105, 2011. Fig. 21: Reza Aramesh, Action 68, 2009. Viet Cong prisoner captured near Tan Son Nhut Airbase, May 6, 1968.
On the other hand, a student of more recent historical events and their representation in the media would perhaps link Action 105 to very different types of visual sources with very different reverberations. Aramesh himself has collected dozens of press photographs showing the same scene played out again and again: men humiliated by other men, Fig. 16: Donato Bramante, Christ at the Column, 1490. forced to strip down to their undergarments and rendered powerless, even emasculated Fig. 15: Reza Aramesh, Action 105 (detail). [photo: Web Gallery of Art/Wikimedia Commons] by virtue of their vulnerable, exposed bodies. Whilst a 1968 press photograph of a Viet Cong detainee is perhaps closest in its composition and details to the finished sculpture, Aramesh’s photographic sources for Action 105 in practice range much more widely, from anti-semitic Nazi propaganda to present-day images of strip searches taking place in the West Bank [Figs. 19 and 20]. Aramesh’s ongoing fascination with this particular theme is further suggested by a slightly earlier work, Action 68, in which the same basic elements of the figural composition are explored not in sculpted form, but through the medium of black-and-white photography, the half-naked standing man now incongruously posed once again in the grand surroundings of Kenwood House [Fig. 21]. It is precisely the power of this insistent repetition, both in the varied sources alluded to by Aramesh and in his own ongoing visual meditations on such themes, that give his compositions much of their psychological impact and aesthetic authority.
Turning back to Action 105, we are drawn to look not just up along the figure’s supple body to his soulful skyward gaze, but also down to his feet, where we spy the carelessly discarded detritus of his individual identity: his shirt, his trousers, even his bright blue socks and hastily untied shoes [Fig. 22]. The figure has been stripped, literally and symbolically, of all that binds him to a specific time, place and event. In short, he has stepped out of a particular historical moment and personal identity and entered into the eternal realm of the imagination. The intricately fashioned plinth upon which he stands signifies as well, its geometric pattern adapted by Aramesh from traditional Islamic decorative designs and architectural forms, a striking contrast to the Christian iconography associated with the pose of the figure planted firmly on this base [Figs. 23 and 24].
Fig. 17: Reza Aramesh, Action 105 (detail). Fig. 18: Francisco Antonio Ruiz Gijón, St. John of Fig. 22: Reza Aramesh, Action 105 (detail). the Cross (detail), circa 1675.
18 19 Fig. 23: Plinth of Reza Aramesh, Action 105. Fig. 24: Detail of carved wooden doors on the 14th-century mosque of Sultan Hassan, Fig. 26: Plinth of Reza Aramesh, Action 107. Fig. 27: Reza Aramesh, Action 107, 2011. Cairo. [photo: Ahmed Al-Badawy/Wikimedia Commons]
Some of the other luxuriously crafted plinths upon which Aramesh’s sculpted figures of multilayered visual allusions and appropriations is actually more akin to the methods are presented are inspired by very different, but equally unexpected sources, such as deployed by his Renaissance and Baroque predecessors than to those used by many of the design of an iron gate encountered during a walk by the artist through the streets his Post Modern contemporaries, who often tend to privilege one type of source from a of Verona. As was the case for the sculptor and photographer Constantin Brancusi, single time and place. who radically rethought the relationship between sculpture and base by constantly experimenting with different combinations of top and bottom in his assemblages, for The distinctiveness of Aramesh’s approach becomes apparent in a work such as Action Aramesh the plinth is likewise a bearer not just of weight, but of meaning, both aesthetic 97, an impressive photographic triptych that selectively reenacts a scene from the and iconographic [Fig. 25]. Franco-Algerian conflict of the mid-1950s in the sumptuous surroundings of the Rodin Museum [Fig. 29]. The muscular body and compact pose of the central, squatting The range of possible associations embedded in Aramesh’s plinths is also evident in the man, his hands clasped behind his back in a sign of submission, instantly recalls one base of Action 107, inspired once again by Islamic decoration [Fig. 26]. Here, Aramesh of the most well-known and oft-copied ancient Greek marbles, the has subtly tweaked the original pattern so that the long, thin tips of dark wood inlay in the Vatican [Fig. 28]. At the same time, Aramesh’s figure brings to mind the many begin to resemble lances or spears. These elements of the design point menacingly Renaissance and Baroque variants of the , such as Michelangelo’s inwards towards the defiant, but ultimately helpless kneeling figure at the centre, so-called Rebellious Slave, carved for the ill-fated tomb of Pope Julius II in the early as though he were being baited by unseen guards surrounding him on all sides, his 16th century [Fig. 30]. The link to the Renaissance master is further strengthened by roughly torn jeans perhaps already pricked by their sharp weapons [Fig. 27]. Beautifully Aramesh’s decision to place the central figure in his composition directly beneath crafted from mellifluously named materials – Indian ebony, fumed eucalyptus, maple, Auguste Rodin’s , significantly also known as The Vanquished (designed satinwood – the plinth’s elegant marquetry and sophisticated tactile allure both entices the hand of the appreciative connoisseur and, thanks to its subtly threatening motif, unsettles the attentive beholder who recalls the violent photojournalistic images of bound, often blindfolded prisoners forced to knee before the knife-end of a bayonet or the barrel of a gun in exactly this type of pose. But are we, the visitors to the exhibition, the ones who now wield the weapons as we circle around this sculpture, even if only by deploying our dagger-like gazes?
Even in such subtle details as the designs of his plinths, we see once again the depth and richness of Aramesh’s references. He is not, of course, the first and far from the only Contemporary artist to allude to earlier visual sources. Thomas Struth, for instance, is well-known for photographing Old Master paintings themselves in situ in museums, galleries and churches, whilst video installations such as Bill Viola’s The Greeting (1995), a slow-motion reenactment of a 16th-century painting by Pontormo, or Sam Fig. 25: View inside Constantin Brancusi’s studio. [photo: Edal Anton Taylor-Wood’s Pietà, a restaging of Michelangelo’s famous Vatican sculptural group Lefterov/Wikimedia Commons] (2001), look to some of the same Renaissance masters that have inspired Aramesh. His restagings of contemporary mass-media images also find an echo in the pioneering work of artists such as Cindy Sherman, in particular her influential series of photographic self- portraits, Untitled Film Stills (1977-80), which simultaneously imitated and critiqued the style and subject matter of mid-20th century American and Italian neo-realist movies. Upon closer consideration, however, it becomes apparent that Aramesh’s use
Fig. 28: Apollonios, , Fig. 29: Reza Aramesh, Action 97, 2010. Fig. 30: Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1st or 2nd-century B.C.E. Rebellious Slave, begun circa 1513. [photo: F. Bucher/Wikimedia Commons] [photo: MM/Wikimedia Commons]
20 21 1876), one of the sculptor’s most famous works that itself references previous artists like Michelangelo and, through him, even earlier Classical sources. In other words, Aramesh’s crouching man not only reenacts a ‘classic’ pose signifying subjugation in the annals of 20th-century photojournalism, but also the ‘classicising’ art first of Rodin and then of Michelangelo, before hearkening back to the original Classical sculptures that ultimately underlie all these interrelated visual sources.
The art of the Baroque, which has so influenced Aramesh in recent years, offers further parallels to his working method, for 17th-century masters similarly referenced both ancient exemplars and their later Renaissance variants, with image layered upon image. In Action 75, for instance, Aramesh’s composition first shifts a scene of intense sadness – a father washing the body of his dead son in a morgue – from a mass-media photo taken in Iraq in 2004 to the grand setting of London’s Armourers and Braziers Hall [Fig. 32]. By positioning his trio of amateur actors beneath commanding portraits of noble ancestors in heavy gilded frames, Aramesh conjures up his own artistic ancestors: mourners on Roman sarcophagi, Renaissance altarpieces depicting tearful lamentations over the dead body of Christ, and Baroque adaptations of this theme by painters like Nicolas Poussin that look back simultaneously to ancient and Renaissance predecessors for their aesthetic and emotional power [Figs. 31 and 33]. In Aramesh’s pieces, like those of his Baroque forerunners, the aim is not necessarily to call to mind a single, specific iconic image – whether modern, ancient or in between – but rather to evoke broad categories of image-making (pictures of present-day prisoners or early Christian martyrs, for instance) and universal types of emotion (fear, submission, sorrow).
Aramesh’s sculptures and photographs not only move through time and space, but also shift from one medium to another and play with our sense of scale, in the process Fig. 31: Nicolas Poussin, Lamentation over the Dead intentionally – and very productively – destabilising the beholder’s expectations. Christ, c.1657-58. [photo: Aiwaz/Wikimedia Commons] As we have seen, Aramesh readily uses three-dimensional sculptures as inspiration for his photographic works and deploys two-dimensional paintings and mass-media reproductions as sources for his carved figures. The same poses are explored again and again, albeit with subtle variations, in both his sculptures and photographs, one enriching Fig. 34: Reza Aramesh, Action 86, 2010. Fig. 35: Reza Aramesh, Action 104, 2011.
the other as flat surface becomes corporeal, black-and-white turns to colour, and then back again, starting the process anew [compare Figs. 20 and 21; Figs. 2 and 32; or Figs. 29, 34 and 35].
Aramesh’s fascination with changes in scale is something also seen in the work of Contemporary artists such as Ron Mueck, Antony Gormley and Jeff Koons. However, Aramesh’s very personal approach to scale is best appreciated not only by encountering his works in the flesh, but by exploring as well his elaborate production processes. These begin with small-scale photographic reproductions, whether from a newspaper clipping or a webpage, which are then literally made life-size by being restaged with living human actors: in the case of his photographic works, in grandiose halls and galleries, whilst for his sculptures, in carefully choreographed photo-shoots in the artist’s London studio [Figs. 36 and 37].
For his photographs, the results are then hand-printed in silver gelatin onto the largest- available sheets of printing paper. Aramesh regularly uses diptych and triptych formats for his photographs because this allows the finished works to evoke the forms of pre- Modern altarpieces and, at the same time, to be as imposing as possible, since their scale can be dramatically increased by placing side-by-side two or even three separate sheets of large-scale photographic printing paper. Nevertheless, the human actors depicted within the photographic works remain slightly under life-size, even if they are enormous compared to their original source images. But this only serves to highlight the figures’ ultimate vulnerability and heighten the sense of incongruity that arises when these slightly smaller-than-life actors in contemporary dress appear in the ‘old-fashioned’ spaces of traditional Western cultural and political power.
Fig. 33: Death of Meleager (detail of second-century Roman Fig. 32: Reza Aramesh, Action 75, 2010. Fig. 36: Reza Aramesh, Action 96, 2010. sarcophagus). [photo: Mbzt/Wikimedia Commons]
22 23 Aramesh’s experimentation with scale is perhaps even more apparent in his sculptures than in his photographic pieces. Action 123, for instance, was initially inspired by a small black-and-white reproduction of a crouching and utterly terrified Korean prisoner of war awaiting execution. Aramesh restaged the pose in his London studio using an amateur model, then marked the surfaces of his photographs to calculate the desired dimensions of the final sculpture [Fig. 37]. This working method recalls Rodin’s habit of editing and reediting his own sculptural models by sketching on photographic reproductions of the objects, in the process becoming the first sculptor to use what was still, in the later 19th century, the relatively new medium of photography as an integral part of his working method. Aramesh’s own photographs with scribbled measurements are then used to produce a much-reduced-in-size clay model, which expert carvers subsequently refer to, together with Aramesh’s photographs and measurements, when once again enlarging the design and transferring it into limewood, the favoured medium of wood carvers in Central and Southern Europe ever since the Middle Ages [Figs. 38 and 39]. The resulting figure is then meticulously polychromed and delicately glazed, with eerily realistic glass eyes inserted into the sockets, thereby creating an unnervingly lifelike, but only three-quarter-sized finished sculpture that is deliberately disorienting, even uncanny to behold [Figs. 40 and 41].
Fig. 37: Photo-shoot for Action 123 directed by Aramesh Fig. 38: Clay models for Action 126 (kneeling figure), Action 125 (prone figure), Action 124 (sitting figure) in his London studio. and Action 123 (crouching figure) in the workshop in Val Gardena, Italy.
Fig. 39: Photographs in use while Action 123 is carved Fig. 40: Reza Aramesh, Action 123, 2011. Fig. 41: Reza Aramesh, Action 123 (detail, before in the workshop. final polychroming).
24 Fig. 44: Reza Aramesh, Action 100, 2010.
Fig. 42: Reza Aramesh, Action 126, Fig. 43: Reza Aramesh, Action 126 in the workshop. in production in the workshop in Val Gardena, Italy.
This highly labour-intensive process, overseen at every stage by Aramesh himself much as a Renaissance or Baroque master would have supervised his own band of apprentices and assistants, begins with camera in hand in the minimalist, white-walled surroundings of the artist’s London studio, but finishes in the crowded confines of the North Italian workshop where the sculptures are eventually carved, painted and polished to a glossy sheen. Here in this most traditional of artisan environments, surrounded by religious statues of Christ and his saints that continue to be produced by the same craftsmen for present-day Christian worship, Aramesh’s hybrid icons gradually emerge, collapsing within themselves the holy and the profane, the old and the new, the living and the dead [Figs. 42 and 43].
Aramesh’s art is, on the one hand, an art of pain, suffering and sorrow that is closely tied to our often involuntary fascination with the representation of such extreme Fig. 46: Reza Aramesh, Action 81, 2010. Fig. 45: Reza Aramesh, Action 104 (detail). physical and psychological states in visual culture in general, but perhaps especially in mass-media photographs, a subject explored at length by Susan Sontag in her influential book Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). Sontag has called such images ever really, truly feel the pain of another [Figs. 44, 45 and 46]. As Elaine Scarry declared ‘a species of rhetoric’ and it is precisely the ‘rhetorical’ nature of recent mass-media in her seminal book (1985), reproductions and their pre-Modern antecedents that Aramesh seeks to deconstruct and ‘even the artist…ordinarily falls silent before pain’. Our pleasure in encountering then recontextualise. But Aramesh’s photographs and sculptures are also about beauty Aramesh’s beautiful, yet often bound, subjugated, even murdered young men is thus and silence: the beauty of the body, especially the half-clad male body as an object of bittersweet, desire tempered by silent reflection on the disturbing images conjured up delight and desire, and the silent emptiness that lies at the very heart of our inability to almost involuntarily in the mind’s eye.
26 27 Ultimately, Aramesh’s works are about life and death, not just as depicted within the varied visual sources that have inspired him, but about the life and death of art itself. Ever since ancient times, the artist has been seen as a kind of magician, a semi-divine shaman invested with life-giving powers, able to animate inert matter and revivify the dead. Aramesh self-consciously plays with this notion by restaging with living actors mass-media images of recent victims of war and terror, some already dead. He then universalises their experiences by disconnecting them from their original referents and connecting them instead by visual means to a long tradition of similar scenes and emotions [Fig. 47]. To return to the epigraph at the start of this essay, in Aramesh’s art, ‘soldiers tear away bandages and the dead rise out of the ground’. Like the cry of the righteous dead in the that provides the title for the present exhibition, Aramesh’s works thus seem to ask us from beyond the grave, from beyond time itself: ‘How long, Master…until you judge and avenge our blood on them who dwell on the earth?’ Significantly, Aramesh leaves the question of revenge unanswered, instead asking his beholders simply to meditate on the long, sad history of humankind’s inhumanity and art’s equally long, beautiful, yet bittersweet attempts to craft an adequate response to the fact that, in the end, the dead can never truly be brought back to life [Fig. 48].
Fig. 47: Reza Aramesh, Action 110, 2010. Fig. 48: Reza Aramesh, Action 125 (detail).
28 29 SCULPTURES ACTION 105
ACTION 125
ACTION 123
ACTION 107
ACTION 126
ACTION 104
ACTION 124
PHOTOGRAPHY ACTION 110
ACTION 96
ACTION 81
ACTION 67 ACTION 97
ACTION 100
ACTION 87
ACTION 111
ACTION 86
ACTION 75
Reza Aramesh
1970 Born in Iran 1997 Graduated with an MA Fine Art, Goldsmiths College, London Lives and works in London
Solo Exhibitions and Projects
2011 Them who dwell on the Earth, Mottahedan Projects, One Marylebone, 2006 Art Car Boot Fair, Brick Lane, London. Curated by Karen Ashton and Helen Hayward London, UK (cat.) 2005 Defense, University of California, Sweeney Art Gallery, USA Walking in the Darkness of a Promised Light, Gallery Isabelle Van Den Enyde, We Have Met The Enemy and He is Us, curated by Shezad Dawood, Redux Project Dubai, UAE Space, London, UK 2010 Between the Eye and the Object falls the Shadow..., Gallery CMOOA, Rabat, Pencil (a drawing show), Carter presents, London Morocco (cat.) Contemporary Drawings, Parnassos Literary Society, Athens, Greece. 2009 Statement, Paris Photo 2009, curated by Catherine Davide, France (cat.) Curated by Synthesis Live Action 71, curated by The Diogenes Club, Late at Tate Britain, London, UK Between the Eye and the Object falls a Shadow..., Isabelle Van Den Eynde Gallery, Dubai, UAE (cat.) 2008 Live Action 60, commissioned for Zoo Art Fair and CollectingLiveArt, London, UK Projects & Publications Best of Discoveries, Shcontemporary, Shanghai, China (cat.) 2007 You Were the Dead, Their’s Was the Future..., Barbican Art Gallery, London, UK 2008 Centrefold Scrapbook, Issue VII, A world without borders ... Who is the Third that Walks Beside You?, Matthew Bown gallery, London, UK 2007 Centrefold Scrapbook, Issue VI, It is is, And it is now only... Reza Aramesh, Watermans Centre, London, UK 2006 Centrefold Scrapbook, Issue V, We’ve lost the heart and minds... We’ve Lost the Hearts and Minds..., E: vent gallery, London, UK (cat.) 2005 Centrefold Scrapbook, Issue IV, I think I’ll Speak Today. 2006 Live Action: I am a Believer, commissioned by ICA, Trafalgar Square, London, UK 2004 Centrefold Scrapbook, Issue III, So You’re Afraid of What? 2005 Live Action: The Key of Dreams, Gasworks Gallery, London, UK Centrefold Scrapbook, Issue II, You’re Not Safe here! Live Action: Of this Men Shall Know Nothing, Thomas Goode Shop, London, UK 2003 Audio Scrapbook, Resonance FM, 2 Hour Transmission. Collaboration with Ben Wright Dance Company, Jerwood Award. Centrefold Scrapbook, Issue I. 2000 Wooden Heart: Diverse curatorial projects comprising 4 shows. Group Exhibitions
2011 Light – Part I, curated by Gabriel Rolt and Nick Hackworth, Paradise Row, London. 2010 Hope!: L’Espoir, de Giacometti a Murakami, curated by Ashok Adiceam, Palais des Arts et du Festival. Dinard, France. (cat.) 2009 Relaunch, Sunbury House, London, UK 2008 Los Vinilos, Zoo Art Fair, London, UK A World without Borders, Event Horizon, GSK Contemporary, Royal Academy of Art, London, UK The Apartment curated by Brian Chalkley and Lewis Amar, Royal London House, London. 2007 Space Invasion, an International Offspace Project, various venues, Vienna, Austria (cat.) Los Vinilos, Buenos Aires, Argentina The Politics of Fear, Albion Gallery, London, UK Temporary Measures, curated by Hut Projects, Associates Gallery, London, UK Into Position, curated by Anthony Gross, Bauernmarkt 1 and 9, 1010 Vienna The Lucifer Effect, curated by Gordon Cheung, Gallery Primo Alonso, London 2006 Making a Scene, curated by Tal Yahas Haifa Museum of Art, Israel (cat.) Metropolis Rise: New Art from London, CQL Design Centre, Shanghai and 798 Art District, Beijing, China (cat.) Culture Bound, East Wing Collection VII, Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, London, UK
118 119 Index Action 96. 2010. Silver gelatin print on aluminum. Diptych. 201 x 240 cm. Edition of three. Sculptures
Action 105. 2011. Polychromed limewood, glass and wood veneers. Marquetry top: fumed eucalyptus and bird’s eye maple. Plinth: fumed eucalyptus and walnut. Overall height: 171 cm. Edition one of three, plus one artist proof. Action 81. 2010. Silver gelatin print on aluminum. Triptych. 210 x 256 cm. Edition of three.
Action 125. 2011. Polychromed limewood, glass and wood veneers. Marquetry top: fumed eucalyptus, Indian ebony, satinwood and maple. Plinth: fumed eucalyptus and walnut. Overall height: 110 cm. Edition one of three, plus one artist proof. Action 67. 2010. Silver gelatin print on aluminum. 152 x 122 cm. Edition of three.
Action 123. 2011. Polychromed limewood, glass and wood veneers. Marquetry top: fumed eucalyptus and maple. Plinth: fumed eucalyptus and walnut. Overall height: 156 cm. Edition one of three, plus one artist proof. Action 97. 2010. Silver gelatin print on aluminum. Triptych. 190 x 254.4 cm. Edition of three.
Action 107. 2011. Polychromed limewood, glass and wood veneers. Marquetry top: fumed eucalyptus, Indian ebony, satinwood and maple. Plinth: fumed eucalyptus and walnut. Overall height: 156 cm. Edition one of three, plus one artist proof. Action 100. 2010. Silver gelatin print on aluminum. Triptych. 195 x 240 cm. Edition of three.
Action 126. 2011. Polychromed limewood, glass and wood veneers. Marquetry top: fumed eucalyptus and bird’s eye maple. Plinth: fumed eucalyptus and walnut. Overall height: 108 cm. Edition one of three, plus one artist proof. Action 87. 2010. Silver gelatin print on aluminum. 122 x 152.4 cm. Edition of three.
Action 104. 2011. Polychromed limewood, glass and wood veneers. Marquetry top: fumed eucalyptus, maple and quilted maple. Plinth: fumed eucalyptus and walnut. Overall height: 155 cm. Edition one of three, plus one artist proof. Action 111. 2010. Silver gelatin print on aluminum. Triptych. 195 x 270 cm. Edition of three.
Action 124. 2011. Polychromed limewood, glass and wood veneers. Marquetry top: fumed eucalyptus and satinwood. Plinth: fumed eucalyptus and walnut. Overall height: 125 cm. Edition one of three, plus one artist proof. Action 86. 2010. Silver gelatin print on aluminum. Triptych. 190 x 225 cm. Edition of three.
Photography
Action 110. 2010. Silver gelatin print on aluminum. Triptych. 195 x 270 cm. Action 75. 2010. Silver gelatin print on aluminum. Triptych. 195.8 x 262.4 cm. Edition of three. Edition of three.
120 121 Essay by
Dr Geraldine A Johnson is a lecturer in History of Art at the University of Oxford and College Fellow of Christ Church. She has edited books on the subjects of Renaissance art, sculpture and photography.
Photography
Mohammad H Sabahi With special thanks to Ashkan Makhzani: Cover, Pages 8-9, Pages 33-73
David Levenson: Pages 4-7
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