Review- Rokni Haerizadeh

While visiting the Carnegie Art Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I encountered work which unexpectedly caught my attention. The work was physically small, mostly sheets of paper placed along a stone balustrade used for transitioning between the larger exhibits. Stepping out from white roomfuls of modern works which barely roused a glance, my brain was triggered into life by these still media images with paintings on them. In the dark marble space full of echoes, laying on narrow, long tables were some of the most stimulating images I had seen.

            ‘The Royal Wedding, ’ and other works by Rokni Haerizadeh, an Iranian-born Artist now in exile in Dubai, are a collection of mass-media imagery on printed papers, books and video. The pieces all represented scenes of the power of those in control of the media and what they wish viewers to see.  Some of it was violently uncomfortable and depicted news reports of uprisings, political affairs, and socio-political propaganda. The Artist added paint (or digital paint) to alter the scenes turning them into something representing pages from a grotesque modern fable. Anthropomorphic animal heads, parts and faces cover over each human head and other select parts. Distorted and unrealistic, the animal features transform the recognizable features into something resembling a non-mask.  Bold colors, repetitive and solid, create something slightly skewed from the original scene. This blanketing distortion of key focal points ironically exposes the deeper issues than what is seen at first glance. It allows an eerie perception of insight into the event and what the original story says is happening.  The transformation of the media reports turns the individuals represented in them into characters from a play with a suggestive moral- “Do not believe everything you see or are told!”

            The visually dynamic form of alteration immediately sets itself aside from passive political satire.  It is common now that violence and oppression in media is so often seen that it tends to induce a numb state.  The insidious nature of the authoritative power figure, once supposed to be esteemed, is reduced to a demonic persona through the vision of animal/human creatures .  Rokni Haerizadeh’s works on the media coverage of “important” events are an exposure of the true nature of oppressors.  Hidden agendas come alive in a new way.  Acted out by the morphed forms that viewers can feel less subjective towards, but still recognize as figures to learn from.  What has been forgotten by proliferation of mass media is re-awakened, stirred into a new life form.  These works by Haerizadeh are the stories of humans re-told without any of the gilding, the fairy tales in their original form. They are a formula for truth.