Hamzianour & Kia is pleased to present 'Pahlavan', an exquisite selection of four Iranian artists, in collaboration with ALANGOO Fine Art online marketplace. The group exhibition includes Najva Erfani, Roxana Manouchehri, Sara Keshmiri and Reza Razm. All four artists explore contortion and evolvement of the body as frames to the hero, the “Pahlavan”, within. They borrow from written and oral epic traditions that are prevalent in the fabric of day to day Iranian life, from the epic of Shahnameh, to mythical and mystical Conference of the Birds. Across these epics and myths, enduring pain and struggling along simultaneously growing and birthing a hero go hand in hand. The artists also visit and revisit gender and identity in a culture that at once rejects the significance of gender by having a genderless language with neuter genders represented in the pronouns, yet magnifies a distinct and deep attitude towards traditional and stereotypical gender rules in the day to day fabric of society.///

Najva Erfani extends the sense of self to the world around her. She sees the world as a game and the players as the heroes that dynamically and swiftly take on new roles. These heroes make hard decisions, struggle with their doubts and desires, and swing away again and again with their failures and wins alike. Najva seeks to depict the struggle and the regular rebirth and mutation that these everyday heroes go through, to swirl in the game of life.

Sara Keshmiri builds upon her experience as a mother - the ultimate hero - in the Iranian society, in which women are to have an extraordinary presence, both warm and caring but also attractive and sensual, naturally with a distinguished vocation. Through her painting, she illustrates the nebulous shift between victim vs. hero, feminine vs. masculine, and self vs. self-reflection. She draws inspiration from the metamorphosis she went through when becoming a mother, and later by rediscovering herself again as the children became young adults. 

Roxana Manouchehri’s work can best be thought of as a mind collage, created by assembling sometime irrelevant images of her dreams, fears, curiosities, love and dreads together, trying to patch and repair the wounds and the chaos in her head and in her real life. Manouchehri relies on collecting memories and patching the fragmented symbolic cultural elements, mostly Persian and Arabesque patterns with one off fragments of East Asian culture, to bring to life her notion of a hero. The impact of living her childhood and adolescence in the Middle East, later on residing in the Far East and now in Europe and the resulting culture shock with each transition is evident throughout her work.

Reza Razm brings to life twisted bodies and excruciated faces, figures with disproportionate ratios and at times incorrect perspectives. The figures are intermingled by fighting tools, with often somber body languages. The colors are further muddled to capture the Kafkaesque existence that modern humanity has to withstand, in a mega sphere where concepts of freedom, choice, identity, and spirituality are just words, and often stay at the very surface without space to penetrate and flourish.