Dubai-based Iranian artist Ramin Haerizadeh fought his way from the paths he was expected to follow to acquire a diverse education in the arts. Exploring photography, drawing, painting, film, animation and collage, he creates multifaceted works that lyrically reclaim and transform found images into arrestingly witty, but tragically troubling, scenes of humanity.
Among multiple reproductions of Haerizadeh’s self, a lone, bearded, veiled, cross-dressed creature crops up incessantly. This creature reveals a culture of concealment, serving as both a metaphor for oppression and a container of safety. As winners re-write history, Haerizadeh, disillusioned, re-writes, camouflages and twists given images and apparent truths. He mimics the hypocritical and grotesque manipulations that shape our disturbing world and forcibly alienate personal and collective memories. The inevitable repetition of abusive behaviour, on any scale, resonates throughout Haerizadeh’s carefully constructed montages of beasts, texts, icons, magazine clippings and media images.
Vali Mahlouji wrote that in Ramin Haerizadeh’s collages ‘he depicts himself as a “simulacrum – a chaos of appearances” (as Jorge Luis Borges said of Citizen Kane) to emphasise a fractured self. Multiple cross-gendered self-portraits appear to celebrate a kind of triumphant bestiality. The artist uses a safety of humourous juxtapositions and candy-soft background colours to contain and camouflage the grotesque absurdity of the exposed internal conflicts, highlighting the schism between the individual’s internal and external realities.’
Ramin Haerizadeh presents a collaborative exhibition with Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian at Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde in March 2012 entitled 'I Put It There, You Name It'. Receiving wide international acclaim, his works featured in Charles Saatchi's 'Unveiled: New Art From the Middle East' London, 2009, Thaddeus Ropac's 'Be Crowned with Laurel in Oblivion', Paris, 2010, 'The Right to Protest' at the Museum of the Seam, Jerusalem, and three solo shows at Gallery IVDE. Beyond this, Haerizadeh has participated in group shows in Berlin, New York, Istanbul and Tehran, and has works in numerous globally recognized collections such as the British Musueum, London, the Devi Art Foundation, Deli, the Rubell Collection, Florida, and the Rosenblum Collection, Paris. The artist presently lives and works with his brother Ramin Haerizadeh in Dubai.