FRANKFURT.- From September 3 to December 13, 2020, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is presenting the first solo exhibition in Germany by Ramin Haerizadeh (*1975), Rokni Haerizadeh (*1978), and Hesam Rahmanian (*1980). The Iranian artist collective’s large-scale installations transport viewers into a highly distinctive world. They create surprising encounters, focus attention on the urgent political and social conflicts of the present challenging power mechanisms, normative gender roles, and the art world.

For the exhibition, Haerizadeh, Haerizadeh, and Rahmanian developed an environment that they regard as an alternative landscape. It revolves around the Near East, around war, exile, and migration as well as quarantine and dance. With melancholic poetry and caustic humor, the artists transform bleak scenes into caricature-like grotesques that reflect the abstruse nature of the global world. The presentation unites a dense web of detailed narratives and references. Based on the principle of work in progress, the artists bring together new and selected existing works. Starting point and centerpiece is the monumental floor painting created especially for the exhibition, O You People! (2020). It is supplemented with sculptures, texts, photographs, sound, as well as five videos including From Sea to Dawn (2016–17), If I Had Two Paths I Would Choose the Third (2020) and Dance After the Revolution (2020). On view are also new works dealing with work and life conditions during the Corona-Pandemic, p. e. the video From March to April . . . 2020 (2020) and the sculptures Alluvium, March–June 2020 (2020).

The basis and center of the trio’s artistic work is their house in Dubai. In the process of living and working together, they create their artworks and exhibitions there—frequently in exchange with friends or other artists. The exhibition presents, for instance, the two sculptures Suggestion: What If We Build Our Own Country, Drinking the Donkey’s Milk, Rather Than the Wolf’s? (2020), which were created in cooperation with the Egyptian artist Hoda Tawakol, or the performative video work We Are the Eighth of a Kind (2014), in collaboration with the American artist and musician Lonnie Holley. Corresponding to their definition of the collective, Haerizadeh, Haerizadeh, and Rahmanian each work in their own style both together as well as independently.

The exhibition “Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian. Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped: Groucho Marx (while getting the patient’s pulse)” is supported by the Verein der Freunde der Schirn Kunsthalle e. V.

“The art of Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian is a strong commentary on our time. Starting from the urgency of current social and political topics, their artistic oeuvre deals with mechanisms of power, migration, and the consequences of wars and conflicts. Their works are created in dialogue—often with other artists from around the world. This international exchange, these encounters beyond day-to-day life significantly broaden our gaze, something that is of central importance more than ever,” emphasizes Dr. Philipp Demandt, director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt.




“What do the Marx Brothers, gender issues, migration, the Iran-Iraq War, and art have to do with each other? In the work of Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian, their Persian roots and Western pop culture come together as well as high culture and camp, the banal and serious political issues. The Iranian artist trio is adept at creating a cosmos that facilitates surprising connections and encounters and thus breaks with conventional patterns. Their environments are just as sensitive as they are visually overwhelming, raising questions regarding identity in a world in motion,” says Dr. Martina Weinhart, the curator of the exhibition.

Fundamental element of the Schirn exhibition is the large-format floor painting O You People! (2020). The structure is based on a nearly ritual performance in which the three artists transform themselves into dastgāh. The Persian term dastgāh denotes all tools that are needed for a particular purpose or process, and, in traditional Persian music, also a melodic matrix for improvisations. As a sort of automated entity or embodiment of a transmitter, the artists challenge the exclusive subjectivity of the painter-princes of modernity with this artistic strategy. The painting combines design principles and motifs from traditional Persian painting with aspects of the present time. Numerous individual scenes are interwoven, and abstractly patterned areas are juxtaposed with representational images. Near and in the water a sort of landscape can be made out. Tourists and headless figures busy with cell phones or tablets are gathered here. They all have the contours of a shamseh (sun medallion)—an ornament commonly found on the covers of ancient Islamic manuscripts. A central group of figures, clinging together in exhaustion, sits on an oversized finger. It is based on a photograph showing a boat overfilled with refugees. In a prominent position a large, braying donkey’s head is depicted—a reference to Pablo Picasso’s famous painting Guernica (1937). The figure of a donkey appears as a subversive and multifaceted motif in various places in this work, as well as in the artists’ oeuvre as a whole, e.g. in the form of the two donkey sculptures Suggestion: What If We Build Our Own Country, Drinking the Donkey’s Milk, Rather Than the Wolf’s? (2020) or in the video performance We Are the Eighth of a Kind (2014). The donkey is generally regarded as patient and humble, undemanding and good-natured, and at times stubborn. In power structures in society, however, it stands for everyman, the gray masses, and is the frugal work animal of rural societies.

References to art history, pop culture, and current or historical events appear in many aspects in the trio’s oeuvre. The title of the exhibition at the Schirn, Either he’s dead, or my watch has stopped: Groucho Marx (while getting the patient’s pulse) thus cites the film classic A Day at the Races (1937) by the Marx Brothers. The basis for the artists’ Moving Paintings are, in turn, pictures archives of photographs and media reports that the artists have compiled themselves. They are then painted over and animated anew by the artists. If I Had Two Paths I Would Choose the Third (2020) is dedicated to the struggle for the dominance of pictures and raises questions regarding the values of society. Media pictures from the Iraq War, published by the British newspaper The Guardian and the AP press agency on April 9, 2003, form the basis of the video work. They show the fall of Baghdad and the regime around Saddam Hussein as well as iconoclasm. From Sea to Dawn (2016–17), another Moving Painting in the exhibition, addresses migration and flight over the Mediterranean in a poignant way.

The artists grew up during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), a fact that continues to shape their lives and artistic work until today. On a large curtain with the title My Son, My Crown (2020), one can see a presentation of a photograph of a mother carrying the mortal remains of her son, who went missing in that war and was found again ten years later—a topic that is also approached by the just as haunting poem Boys and Animals. The social upheavals and aftereffects of the Iranian Revolution (1978–79) also permeate the exhibition. The video work Dance After the Revolution (2020) is dedicated to a popular style of dancing that developed in Iran in the 1980s despite the ban on dancing, and subverts traditional gender roles. This dance style was inspired by illegally distributed dance and fitness videos by the Iranian dancer Mohammad Khordadian, who was living in exile in Los Angeles.

As a collective, the artists also address current events very directly. The exhibition thus presents not least works that were created during the corona pandemic. The video From March to April . . . 2020 (2020) casts the period of the artists’ quarantine in a poetic form. While the days of the week from Monday to Sunday are repeated again and again in the voiceover, the camera slowly pans a dining table that is simultaneously a desk on which life and work take place in a very confined space. The two sculptures Alluvium, March–June 2020 (2020) also come from the same context: they consist of steel frames with ceramic plates on which the artists painted and collaged motifs from the stream of media reports of these months.

Ramin Haerizadeh (*1975, Tehran), Rokni Haerizadeh (*1978, Tehran), and Hesam Rahmanian (*1980, Knoxville, Tennessee) met each other in Tehran in the mid-1990s. Hesam Rahmanian completed studies of calligraphy and visual art, first in Tehran and subsequently in the United States. Rokni Haerizadeh studied painting and Persian literature in Tehran, and Ramin Haerizadeh has dedicated himself to painting, photography, and film in particular. The artists have been living and working together in a shared house in Dubai since 2009. Their works have been shown in solo exhibitions around the world, including at the Kunsthalle Zürich (2015), the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) (2017), and the Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2019). They have also participated in numerous group exhibitions and biennials, including at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston, the 9th Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art (2016), the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk (2019), the Toronto Biennial of Art (2019), and the Biennale of Sydney (2020). The artists were awarded the Han Nefken’s Foundation MACBA Award for Contemporary Art. In addition to their own exhibition activities, the collective has also curated and conceived numerous exhibitions by artist colleagues.