For Taha Heydari (b. 1986, Tehran, Iran), painting is the ‘what’ that affords an investigation of the ‘how’. The artist’s solo exhibition 12 Volt Fire presents a survey of paintings of seemingly absurd and disparate moments related to the 1979 Iranian Revolution, with the aim of investigating its metaphysics, and of reframing it as a dynamic network of ‘actants’ that traverse socio-political, technological, mythical, and collective forces.
Born into a religious family in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war, Heydari’s work has long engaged with how ideology manifests in daily life, and how the medium of painting can be used to investigate it, with particular consideration of the effects and processes of technological mediation. Excavating moments of the past from archival print material, his paintings unearth the structural forces which give rise to social change in the present and future.
In this exhibition, he adopts a notably mechanical style of mark-making. Vibrant hashed lines reminiscent of digital fabric deliberately reflect the materiality of his digital source imagery. Upon first glance, the scenes appear vibrant and clear. Yet somehow, the horizontal and vertical lines find moments of fade, leaving forms that hover between presence and absence. Between pixel-like lines of histories and memories, questions begin to emerge: not only of the role of the depicted events in the revolution, but also of the role of ‘image’ itself as an active entity. From the collective vision of Khomeini on the moon, to scanned photographs sent by the artist’s sister in Iran, and to the very paintings themselves, each image propagates agencies that Heydari strives to actively indicate.
Finding a revitalisation of painting beyond its traditionally representational mode of communication, Taha Heydari critically examines the socio-political impact of the revolution and the means through which it came to be, with a crucial sensitivity for the plurality of its parts, and their mystery and absurdity.
