Alluvium

OGR

Alluvium

Curated by Samuele Piazza
April, 20 – November, 27, 2022

OGR Torino comes back to Venice, in occasion of the 59th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, in the spaces of the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, presenting for the first time in the Lagoon the threesome of Iranian artists Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian for a new site-specific project: ALLUVIUM.

The title ALLUVIUM recalls the clay, the gravel and the silt deposited by the running water and it is open to different readings. It recalls the materiality of paintings featured in the exhibition and of their terracotta physical stands, and metaphorically the remains of a more abstract flow: the debris left by the flow of news, cultural images and history which the artists scour and scan and from which they collect settled materials, gathered for gaining a new life, in an act of resistance and creation of a counter-narrative.

Alluvium is composed by a series of structures which artists created in collaboration with a blacksmith living in Dubai, Mohammed Rahis Mollah. These iron sculptures support a series of terracotta plates, realized by local artisans, according the Middle East tradition. The plates accommodate the artists’ paintings creating compositions and constellations in a delicate balance.

The paintings on the plates are the result of a rewriting of the images coming from the news: the flux of images to which we are exposed and which goes to compose an official narrative, is contrasted by a rewriting which traces an alternative registration of our times, creating a new imagination alternative to these representations; overlapping the images to edit them, replicating them and redrawing them according to new geometrical axes such as on the Islamic ceramics, extracting them with flat bottoms like on the Persian miniatures, they lay out an unprecedented image of the present time.