Wednesday, November 2nd, 2022
Premiering on Soundcloud
Black Mountain College Radio is a podcast project from Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center.
Each program in this series focuses on various topics related to Black Mountain College. Our hope is to deepen your relationship with the college’s vital legacy, its continuing impact, and the work of our Asheville-based museum.
This episode, we’re joined by Iranian-born and Dubai-based artists Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, Hesam Rahmanian. They are the recipients of the annual BMC Prize, and will be further developing their interdisciplinary practice at the historic BMC campus at Lake Eden, as well as the museum + arts center in downtown Asheville.
Ramin, Rokni, and Hesam’s practice uses collaboration and improvisation to decenter their creative processes in ways that generate dynamic assemblages, which unfurl into what they refer to as ‘landscapes’. They recontextualize and recombine cultural objects, aesthetics, histories — and even their own bodies — developing relations and gestures which provoke new possibilities of meaning.
Ramin Haerizadeh’s mixed-media collages and computer-manipulated imagery offer a critical perspective on the Iranian regime, satirically drawing on the country’s history and invoking traditional motifs of Persian tapestries, fabrics, and carvings. He is best known for “Men of Allah”, a series inspired by plays from Persia’s Qajar period, which often told stories from the life of Mohammad. He is the brother of the painter Rokni Haerizadeh; the two artists fled Iran in 2009 following the appearance of their work in an exhibition at the Saatchi gallery in London.
Rokni Haerizadeh was born in Tehran in 1978. He earned a BA in fine arts and an MFA in painting from the University of Tehran. With his brother Ramin, also an artist, Haerizadeh has lived and worked in Dubai since 2009. With wit and irony, his exuberant paintings, small gesso-on-paper works, and stop-motion animations address contemporary politics in his native Iran and beyond, incorporating a prodigious range of tropes and influences, from painter Eric Fischl’s images of American suburbia to social media memes and Persia’s grand literary history.
Hesam Rahmanian has had a number of solo and group exhibitions internationally. In March 2012, he presented an exhibition alongside Rokni and Ramin Haerizadeh at Gallery IVDE entitled I Put It There, You Name It. Rahmanian has had solo shows at Paradise Row, London, and at Traffic, Dubai, and participated in a group show at the Royal College of Art, London, as one of eight finalists for the MOP CAP 2011 prize. Alongside his painting, he has received international recognition for his design projects, and featured work in Taschen’s 2009 publication Design For Obama: Posters For Change.