Alluvium

Hesam Rahmanian first met brothers Ramin Haerizadeh and Rokni Haerizadeh in Tehran in the early 1990s. At the time, the three artists attended many of the same informal art classes and gatherings that were held in private homes due to the restrictions imposed during the Iranian Cultural Revolution in the aftermath of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War. The artists held their first individual exhibitions in Tehran in the late 1990s around which time they also began to produce work collaboratively. In 2009 they relocated to the United Arab Emirates where they established a communal residence and studio in Dubai and increasingly focussed their energies on collaborative works. The new studio environment in Dubai also enhanced their ability to incorporate contributions from a network of friends and associates - including artisans, technicians, and writers – which has become a hallmark of their practice.

Hesam, Ramin and Rokni have described their art as being “about generosity and celebration, to embrace other people as an answer to the challenges of the world in which we all live. In a way, this is about de-centring yourself, allowing a hollowness to make space to appreciate others.” They work across a diverse range of media, and often explore the subject of the exile both as a metaphorical construct and as matter of lived experience. Their visual language refers to the contemporary news media and popular culture and the artists have also described drawing upon Iranian literature and Persian painting of the late-Safavid to the early Qajar dynasties.