Ramin Haerizadeh’s Men of Allah series presents a bizarre pastiche of the artist’s body and bearded face. Through photo manipulation, Haerizadeh’s face is set atop bloated bellies, barely concealed by swathes of brilliant, patterned fabric. The beauty of these patterns is offset by momentary revulsion, as flesh and fabric intertwine and compete for our attention.

These photo-collages emphasize the fragmentation and contradictions at work in Iranian identity. The artist depicts himself as a ‘simulacrum, a chaos of appearances’, while the more troubling facets of this society remain camouflaged in a collision of humorous and kitsch imagery. The title of the series references photographer Shirin Neshat’s ‘Women of Allah’ series (1993-1997), in which women were portrayed in tough, typically ‘male’ situations. In Haerizadeh’s compositions, however, the ‘Men of Allah’ are captured in a rather playful light - these ‘Closet Queens’, as the artist has referred to them, address broader social issues that remain unacknowledged in Iran.

Also included here is ‘Iran without the Shah’, a series of works that reflects on the celebrations following the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. In one, Haerizadeh plays with the common scenes of people carrying defaced portraits of the Shah and other royal family members through the streets at this time. While in another work, we see bearded men in veils erupting through the neck of an unnamed royal matriarch, kicking away her crown. In this same image, a face leans in to kiss her tenderly, Illustrating the mixed feelings of the population towards the royal family and also the lack of consistency in what they really want. First, they kicked out the Shah’s dictatorship only to replace it with an Islamic version. Now, they want this one out as well, the artist seems to suggest.

Haerizadeh’s work is a reflection of the chaotic collision of ideas and mire of nonsense in which he feels his country has been since he was a child.