Guggenheim Abu Dhabi’s latest exhibition sees life from interesting angles

Guggenheim Abu Dhabi comes to life with The Creative Act: Performance, Process, Presence, its latest exhibition that invites the viewer to explore the human condition from quirky angles.

Hesam Rahmanian, Rokni Haerizadeh, Ramin Haerizadeh and Nargess Hashemi. Christopher Pike / The National

When Alice falls down the rabbit hole, she is thrust into a surreal world that warps reality. Yet underlying the peculiarity of it, the satire in Lewis Carroll’s fairy tale is rich and provides a goldmine of psychological analysis.

The same can be said of the immersive artworks produced by Dubai-based trio Rokni Haerizadeh, his older brother Ramin Haerizadeh and their friend Hesam Rahmanian (pictured with Nargess Hashemi).

They use costume, role-play and humour to produce their art and rarely is any piece simply hung on a wall or projected onto a screen – they prefer to create entire rooms to stimulate all the senses of the audience and to present several viewpoints on any given subject.

“We are one body with multiple critical eyes,” says Rahmanian of their work. “The three of us become one person when we work,” continues the younger Haerizadeh.

"We are questioning the idea of the body – the physical body and also the discipline and ritual of art." For Guggenheim Abu Dhabi's newest exhibition, which opens on Saadiyat Island on Tuesday, March 7, the trio was commissioned to create an installation titled Another Happy Day (2016-17).

This piece specifically addresses this concept of the body – both physical and conceptual – and attempts to redefine it in specifically regional terms.

The artwork is split over three rooms, which parallels the Guggenheim exhibition that is divided into three subthemes to explore the act of creating art. The curators chose artworks where the process of making the art was almost as important as the piece itself, something that resonates well with the Dubai-based trio.

“Our practice is parallel to those in this exhibition because of the way we produce our work. This room is a report of the condition of our time, which is more important for us than the final result,” explains Rokni.

The viewer will enter Another Happy Day through a narrow corridor painted with a hypnotic pattern of close-set black-and-white triangles, creating an optical illusion akin to being thrust down a rabbit hole of sorts. At the end of the corridor, a video plays showing the three marching up and down a short pier, dressed in pig masks to the narration of a translated Farsi poem.

The second room is filled with draped woven material made by another Iranian artist – Nargess Hashemi – which the Haerizadehs describe as “ghost architecture” that “conjures up the idea of the womb”.

On the walls of this room paintings and drawings hang and these artworks also appear in videos projected onto the wall. The repetition of these objects is a deliberate act to force the viewer to question their role as an onlooker. “We are inviting the audience to think and question both the art world and the art object,” explains Rokni.

“We want to reverse the position of artist and viewer,” says Rahmanian.

“We are asking people to be critical not in a diminishing way, but to see things from another angle.”

This room take direct reference from a dramatic theory central to the work of Bertolt Brecht, who used techniques designed to distance the audience from emotional involvement through jolting reminders of the artificiality of the theatrical performance.

In the context of art and the art scene, this is crucial to understanding why the trio use over-the-top and exaggerated forms of expression.

The final room, which is also a finale to the whole exhibition, is painted from top to bottom with what is now known as a trademark style for these artists. The eye picks up on the same hypnotic patterns on the floor and walls as well as other details such as domes of Islamic architecture, body parts, waves of water and a backpack.

It is seemingly chaotic, but the overall aesthetic is supposed to resemble a medieval map and the debris floating on the water references the ongoing refugee crisis.

“When we attempted to assemble the body of this region we started to think about the refugee crisis,” says Rokni.

“We have a responsibility to answer questions as artists who live and work in the region and to be aware of the politics and social atmosphere as well as the viewer.”

“Indeed, the audience, too, are part of the work as it is them who will complete it,” concludes Rahmanian.

• The Creative Act: Performance, Process, Presence runs from March 7 to July 29 on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi