Rokni Haerizadeh  Rokni Haerizadeh (born 1978) is an Iranian artist living and working in Dubai. He participated in the Carnegie International in 2013. Rokni Haerizadeh was born in Tehran shortly before the start of the Iran-Iraq War. In a 2014 interview with Artforum, Haerizadeh described how his early experiences and questions about art were directly impacted by the war: "The TV programs at that time mostly depicted Islamic propaganda of the war, martyrs, and religion, but sometimes during the weekends they showed movies by directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Akira Kurosawa, Sergei Eisenstein […] Seeing, for example, a beautiful landscape with a man silently walking around for ten minutes moved me, and I wondered: Is that a movie? Is that art?" Haerizadeh gained international attention during the mid-2000s for his paintings that brought together, on canvas, his observations about social or public gatherings in Iran – particularly weddings, religious festivals, funerals and banquets – and reveal the hedonistic, ritualised or violent sides of human nature that are buried in such spectacles. His diptych ‘Typical Iranian Wedding’ (2008) was exhibited in Unveiled: New Art From The Middle East at Saatchi Gallery, London, in 2009. This was followed by solo and group exhibitions in Paris, Dubai, New York and Istanbul. After 2009, Haerizadeh sought new definitions of painterly practice that could lift the medium off white canvas. In his on-going project of works on paper, Fictionville (2009–) Haerizadeh paints directly onto news photographs or stills taken from news footage. Taking its title from the 1968 play Shahr-E Qesseh (‘City of Tales’) by Bijan Mofid, Fictionville "places […] emphasis on the equalizing effect of news cycles" and attempts to show how the media equates violence and popular protest with entertainment, interspersed with the spectacles of state visits and official pomp. Transforming the ‘characters’ contained in these stills into human-animal hybrids or mocking clownish figures, and their surroundings into ludicrous landscapes, "It is via the act of deliberate deformation that the work is anchored in the hand and body of the artist, and finally that the public is rendered private." Haerizadeh is represented by Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai.