DUBAI.- Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde is presenting Don’t worry, spiders, I keep house casually, the second solo exhibition of Dubai-based artist Hesam Rahmanian. The exhibition consists of assemblages, sculptural objects, and groupings such as “deadlines” and “corner works,” paintings that have taken on spatial, architectural form.
The name of the exhibition is derived from a haiku by famed Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828), considered one of the masters of the form. Issa’s poems often reference, or are directly addressed to the often forgotten plants and forms of life that the human species shares its world with. This careful awareness of beings on the periphery of our existence extends into the work itself.
The artist’s Dubai studio and home plays a significant role in the production of these works. One of the creatures living in this collective environment, the artist shares space with fellow artists Rokni Haerizadeh and Ramin Haerizadeh, as well as a collection of accumulated and constantly shifting and manipulated artworks, objects, and materials. These objects are both finished and unfinished, new materials and detritus, being built or falling apart, and being deconstructed and destroyed.
A guiding philosophy behind the production of these works is an ontology that is oriented towards a radical equality between objects (object-oriented ontology), where there is no distinction or difference between human beings, non-human life, and objects which populate the world. In this way, the works themselves tend away from the heroism and centrality of the artist and the work of art. Instead, they focus on objects marginalised in the collective environment – a pair of pliers, a chair, the space between the shower and sink, spiders, boxes.
Hesam Rahmanian (born Knoxville, 1980) lives and works in Dubai. Rahmanian has held solo exhibitions at Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai (2013), Paradise Row, London (2011) and Traffic, Dubai (2010). He works collectively with Ramin and Rokni Haerizadeh, and the three artists also work independently and together in a collective that constantly grows and contracts to coordinate friends, writers and artists. The collective has presented solo exhibitions at Officine Grandi Riparazioni (OGR), Turin (2018), MACBA, Barcelona (2017), Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston (2015), Kunsthalle, Zurich (2015), Den Frie Center for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen (2015), Busan Biennale, South Korea (2018), Liverpool biennale, UK (2016) and The 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane (2015), among others.
