Fictionville
Over the years, the work in the series "Fictionville" by Rokni Haerizadeh has taken on multiple shapes and forms ,from idiosyncratic paintings to drawings to animations and now to collage. He breathes life into forms and then kills, rendering his canvas or paper a dynamic place in which the workings of memory and the subconscious battle.This body of work seems intent on unsettling the viewer, its intertwining of the familiar and the bizarre seems calculated to provoke amusement as much as outrage. Layers of paint and ink subvert and transform the printed image, turning human figures into human-animal hybrids.The background of each image is a news photograph or a still of news footage which is then prepared painted with large washes of colour and drawn over with fine pen and ink that give the image its new contours.
The interventions are subtle.A snout like nose exaggerated here, a hoof peeking out out there, heads with hints of donkey ears or horns.Other times the picture underneath has been completely painted over.Armies of cats stand off against mice, rows of beasts perform military saluted and checkerboard floors decorate public arenas.
Violence is the common link.The works target the falseness and hypocrisy of acts committed in the name of institutions that govern the private and social sphere, such as the social models put forward by the state, the church(mosque), the school or the family.If the images are uncanny,it is because we recognize familiar prejudices in strange bodies.Performed by demons and beasts, human actions take on a surprising expressiveness.
Its insistent experimentation with what Haerizadeh describes as "personal mythologies" are nonetheless grounded in concrete social and political archetypes. The use of animal imagery has a respectable political pedigree. In its approach it seems like George Orwell's Animal Farm, a parable of human malice and collective failure .
The cumulative effect is to distance the viewer from the scene's immediate motivations or geopolitical coordinates, often the only indication of actual location is a fragment of a caption, the language of markings on police shields, or the telltale signage of store fronts.Violence speaks the same language these images suggest, whether in Tehran or London or Moscow whether spoken by the victim or the perpetrator.The moral dilemma is how to negotiate our numbed response to the rise and fall of news cycles and their sound byte politics rather than how we may judge the victims or victors.
Haerizadeh describes his approach as doodling; a deskilled intuitive process, that claims no mastery of what might emerge and is defined by its distracted and mediated nature.
Here is a dialogue about a truth, that may lie beyond facts.
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