In the past a sculptor would sit in front of a block of marble, stone or wood and painstakingly carve out of it a figure. Nowadays, though, things are slightly different: thanks to new and advanced techniques quite often an artist conceives an idea that is then turned into a reality by another person, by a team of technicians or a company (modern sculptures can indeed be the result of machine processes such as 3D printing). Yet, at the end of the process, it is the artist who retains the merit, and we rarely see a mention of the other people who had an instrumental role in the artistic process.
The modus operandi of Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian is instead radically different. The three Iranian artists refuse the authorship concept and include in their works not just the other artists who have shared with them their vision, but also the technicians, light designers or carpenters who worked with them installing the works.
Their latest exhibition at Turin's Officine Grandi Riparazioni (OGR, Corso Castelfidardo 22, Turin) is the result of a two week-long experience, during which they collaborated together and interacted with other people who shared with them the working process.
Curated by Abaseh Mirvali, the exhibition is entitled "Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home" (until 30th September 2018), a sentence taken from a line from "Under One Small Star", a poem by Polish poet and essayist Wisława Szymborskaayist).
Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian often create a series of alter egos, also known as dastgah, a term that in Farsi means apparatus or device and also indicates a musical modal system.
By becoming dastgah, the three artists transform their bodies, covering them in assemblages of found objects, often old, broken and forgotten, that turn them into mysterious creatures who have lost any human traits and who live inside video installations and documentaries. When the artists play with these identities, they are finally able to tackle themes linked to language, space, transformation, pain and destruction.
At the OGR exhibition the dastagh journey starts with a video - "Black Hair" - a collaboration with artists Nargess Hashemi, Laleh Khorramian, and friends Edward St. and Indrani Sirisena that follows the vicissitudes of a group of people threatened by a surreal enemy - a strand of black hair.
The set of the video is recreated in the exhibition space so that visitors can interact with it, blurring reality and fiction and trying to understand who is the mysterious dark force behind the murderous strand of black hair.
"Slice A Slanted Arc Into Dry Paper Sky" is another immersive set inspired instead by the interior decor or Jean Genet's Les bonnes (The Maids), that features an environment populated by random objects and artworks by Hassan Sharif, Annette Messager, Jean Rustin and James Son Ford Thomas, plus the installation "Collected stories by Niyaz and Lo'Bat".
The latter consists in a biomorph creature, a sort of bat-like parachute with embroidered wings characterised by the colours and consistency of jellyfish that move unpredictably when visitors pass next to the installation.
There's more to discover in "Where's Waldo?" in which the artists manipulated images from the news and the media adding painted elements, almost coming up with their own version of fake and fantastic news.
"The Birthday Party", is instead inspired by Harold Pinter, and features a video surrounded by the remains of a birthday party: the cult of the Zār in Ethiopia is combined with consumerism in this installation featuring dastgah that seem interested not just in dancing as if they were possessed by a mysterious force, but also in unwrapping useless birthday presents and randomly stacking them together glueing them with a material similar to the fondant sugar paste employed for cakes.
"Individual Practices" serves as a picture-based archive of images shot before and after the Iranian revolution (1978), while "Break Free" is a sort of still life with a table covered in Fluxkits, a series of Fluxus objects collected by the three artists, and represents a sort of last arty supper to which visitors are invited.
"From Sea To Dawn", a painting in movement closes this event: it features images appropriated from YouTube videos and from the TV, from newspapers and magazines, some of them portraying migrants and the Syrian conflict.
The artists transformed the people in the images into hybrid creatures, half humans, half animals, as an allegory for violence and to hint at the fact we have become so inured to seeing reports about tragedies that we often look at images of death and destruction without even flinching (this part of the event is particularly relevant with the current migrant situation in Italy and with the measures imposed by the clueless, cruel and cynical Italian Minister for the Interior).
Rather than being a retrospective of Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian's works, "Forgive me, distant wars" is a sort of journey for the collective of artists and technicians who created and collaborated to put it together, but also for the visitors who are invited to spend some time in the various sets and settings and think about the issues tackled.
The artistic value of the event does not stand indeed in the single pieces on display, but in the stories and narratives told via them, and in the processes that went through to shoot the videos, assemble the works and install them in the OGR spaces.
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