Dubai resident, Rokni Haerizadeh, wins Artissima’s first OGR award

Works from his Fictionville series will be featured at the Officine Grandi Riparazioni in Italy

Rokni Haerizadeh has been selected as the winner of the first Officine Grandi Riparazioni award for his Fictionville series. Photo courtesy the artist and Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde
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Rokni Haerizadeh has been selected as the first winner of the Officine Grandi Riparazioni (OGR) award which will showcase his work in Torino at the new visual and performing arts centre.

Mr Haerizadeh, who has lived in Dubai since 2009, was selected from more than 200 galleries that took part in Artissima, a contemporary art fair featuring international artists with a focus on experimentation and research. A selection from his series Fictionville was chosen “due to their engaging images that find overtones in the contemporary world,” Artissima said in a statement.

Fictionville has been an ongoing project since 2009, with Mr Haerizadeh painting directly from news sources, from images to video stills. His moving paintings are rotoscope video works made up of thousands of individually painted stills, according to the Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde. The work moves to highlight the discourse between ideology and a voyeurism towards violence prevalent in tabloid newspapers.

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Artissima said: “Mr Haerizadeh extends the boundaries of painting to transform news, photographs and images of current events into mythological visions that reveal a corrupt circus of humanised beasts and other unreal creatures, all inserted in a fantasy landscape. He sees art in everyday life, without drawing boundaries between the two worlds.”

His work has been featured in many top institutions including the Guggenheim, Carnegie Museum of Art, British Museum and Tate Modern. Mr Haerizadeh and his brother, Ramin, have also completed an art installation shown at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi’s March exhibition alongside their partner Hesam Rahmanian.