A Review of Sepehr Hajiabadi's Solo Show 

Original text in Farsi by Abel Hartouni

Translated to English by Omid Armat

Sepehr Hajiabadi arranged his first solo exhibition titled "Teieb" from Sep 17 to October 1, 2021 in collaboration with Dastan's Basement. The show consisted of 12 oil paintings, one painting produced with acrylic ink on photographic paper, and also a book titled "Mandatory Offers (Guide for Being Teieb)". Hajiabadi was born in 1992 in Karaj. Graduated from Fine Arts School in Karaj, he has been drawing for many years, but since five years ago, he has focused on painting. He has previously collaborated with the Eastern Whistle group.  

In this show, Sepehr Hajiabadi presented the results of a research he conducted for about two years regarding the controversial, inconsistent life of Teieb Hajrezaii. Teieb was a prominent Zourkhaneh athlete and Luti (Laat) in the 1950s and 1960s in Tehran, who tended towards different, opposing political parties (supporting Pahlavi regime during the 1953 Iranian coup, while being apprehended by the Pahlavi regime and executed by firing squad along with his group members during the 1963 demonstrations in Iran). He also has an ambiguous position in Persian popular culture. According to Hajiabadi, his curiosity, rather than being focused on Teieb's political tendencies, are more about the dynamism and moralities of Luti's culture throughout Iran's contemporary history, and the repetition of some of its aspects over the years. 

In Teieb show, Hajiabadi has tried to combine formal methods and properties with which he has been engaged, and just like his previous works, he does not look for any specific personal form. He has also used works related to a wide range of artists and periods of art history as references, which is visible in this series too. He generally uses his photo archive for creating his artworks. He sometimes depicts them as they are seen, but he usually tries appropriation and concentrates on performance and improvisation abilities of the mind; the method which he used previously in his portrait series, or in "Series of One" in which an image of a humorous struggle between two Nazi soldiers was repeated in different forms and with various techniques.  

Among the works of this show, we first see portraits of Teieb, similar to Warhol's portraits (but of course, these portraits are painted, not printed), which are repeated with four different tinges. Regarding Teieb's fragile conditions in this specific moment (which seems to be the time when he was brought to court) and his aged face, we cannot claim that Hajiabadi has created this repeated series of Teieb's portraits just to present a heroic image to commemorate him. On the adjacent wall, there is an untitled artwork in which men are standing with a gesture of Zourkhaneh athletes, and Teieb is standing in the middle. Their bodies are merged and scattered in a way that is similar to Salvador Dali's works. There is also an image of Teieb and his disciples in suits with a gesture of Italian mafias; and a portrait picturing Teieb in his youth on a yellow background, which reminds me of Eduardo Aroyo's portraits. The last artwork of the show, with its lower color saturation, is titled "Heshmatie" which depicts the location in which Teieb was executed by the firing squad. The color palette, subject and mood of this work remind the viewer of works by Luc Tuymans, and finally, in "Deep Tissue Massage" which is also the exhibition's poster, most of Hajiabadi's painting practices are presented altogether. The painting is created by manipulating an image of massaging Shaban Jafari in an imaginary space. Figures which are divided into porous pieces merging into each other, and immersed in flashlight, are apparently massaging a disintegrated figure. Some kind of an explosion happened inside the main figure and turned it into pieces scattered in the space, while figures in the background are turned into surfaces winding around each other and also merging with the space.  

"Mandatory Offers (Guide for Being Teieb)", which is printed in a limited number of copies with the contribution of Dastan's Basement, shows a different attitude comparing to Hajiabadi's studies of his subjects. The book clarifies the artist's personal ideas about the subject. With a more abstract rhetoric, it presents the story of Teieb's life and the unwritten manners of being a Luti in the form of easy-to-read instructions. By writing this book, Hajiabadi aimed to find a meeting point between contradictory narratives about Teieb's life, and also to carry out his work and studies outside the gallery's space.  

It seems that Hajiabadi is less concerned with following a social or political orientation through addressing such a sensitive subject. Rather, he has tried to express his personal curiosities about Teieb as a special public figure, and even more important than that, to find his personal expression in painting. Although his neutral approach favors the story's hero, rather than the antihero, we can claim that Hajiabadi has found a proper identity between different pictorial references and attitudes which are sometimes in contradiction to his own path in art. We can also conclude that Hajiabadi's "Teieb" is more about the dynamic, variant, and contradictory nature of painting, rather than showing a way of creating heroes.  

All images courtesy of  Dastan's Basement. Photographs of the show's installation by Matin Jame'ee.