NYAB Event - Shoja Azari "Icons"

Shoja Azari "Icons"

Leila Heller Gallery

This event has ended.

"Icons", the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York City, will feature six new video works, which examine the role of saints and heroes in modern society. A fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Sam Bardaouil, Dr. Hamid Dabashi, and Benjamin Genocchio will accompany the exhibition.

In the early 20th century, coffee house-style painting flourished in Iran. Based on Persian mythology, the large paintings depicted the heat of battle, the afterlife and martyrdom, truth and justice, and the apocalypse. The paintings expressed respect for religious and traditional beliefs and served as a backdrop for entertainment in the coffee houses of Iran as storytellers would act out the epic scenes depicted in the paintings. Azari has appropriated coffee house painter Modabber’s, The Day of the Last Judgment, a painting dense with imagery and symbolism, and transformed it into a video work projected onto a black canvas, Coffee House Painting, 2009, infused with images of today’s saints and sinners.

In his catalogue essay, Hamid Dabashi, Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, writes, “Shoja Azari’s invitation is initially innocuous, familiar, and homely. Then things begin to happen. Pictures begin to move, images start morphing and altering into and out of each other. Wars and mayhems begin to change time, space, history, sides. We are on a move—towards the unfamiliar that is (alas) only too familiar, unhomely that is homely.”

The Icons series, 2010, is comprised of five video works and five photograp on light boxes that appropriate popular posters of saints in Iran. Inspired by how Renaissance painters humanized religious figures, Azari seeks to make icons resonate in a new way.