The Rain Doesn’t Know Friends From Foes

Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian work collectively to create installations, paintings on paper, and stop-motion animations that transform found materials in order to recast and critically examine contemporary history-in-the-making. The Dubai-based Iranian artists’ animations are composed from thousands of individual works on paper, in which they collage and paint over printed stills from internet videos and television newscasts. Detaching this imagery from its original context to estrange its meaning, their works interrogate the entertainment value of the news and the voyeuristic role of the spectator as a passive consumer of mass media spectacle.

The Rain Doesn’t Know Friends From Foes—their first exhibition on the West Coast—will include selected works on paper and a survey of their animations to date, including the US debut of From Sea to Dawn (2016–17) and Macht Schon (2016). Both videos intervene in the photojournalistic representation of migrants crossing into Europe, interjecting painterly patterns, fablelike animal imagery, and surreal mirroring effects. In From Sea to Dawn, these alterations serve to disrupt the Western moral codes (especially the sentimental, romanticizing pathos) embedded in the photographs, while in Macht Schon, they allegorize the actions of Hungarian journalists caught on video tripping fleeing migrants.

Also included are Big Rock Candy Mountain (2015), in which artifacts toppled by ISIS militants thwart their censors by mutating into fanciful mythic beasts; Letter! (2014), which amplifies the performative, media-induced hysteria of a protest by the radical activist group Femen; Reign of Winter (2012–13), a grotesque adaptation of the coverage of Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding that underscores the arcane, densely coded nature of ceremonial spectacles; and Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (2010–11), in which media imagery from the 2009 Iranian demonstrations is transformed into a sordid pageant of monstrous animalistic humanoids. The latter was inspired by Bijan Mofid’s satirical musical play Shahr-e Qesseh, or City of Tales, which was written in 1968 as an allegory about the strictures of pre-Revolutionary Iran and adapted from traditional folk tales. Turning this tactic on the present moment, the artists’ videos and works on paper foreground the irrationality and violence that underlies our hypermediated reality and many societal conventions.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website