TAHA HEYDARI

 

 

1986 born in Tehran, Iran

 

 

 

Taha Heydari’s works deconstructs the process by which media images, most associated with the Middle East, seduce the unwary into joining violent groups. The particular fluency of Islamic radicalism in the use of such methods has made the phenomenon a universal concern and Heydari explores the esthetic terrain of their propaganda. Heydari was trained in the art of miniature painting in Iran. He brings his highly-sensitized eye to the glossy post-modern palette of images generated by electronic screens, today’s equivalent of recruitment posters. He harvests into collages the kind of morally toxic, deceptively banal, visual junk that feeds the region’s wars with subliminal messages.  Always ambivalent, suggestive, mysterious, his works invite the viewer to decipher, to look again and see the shiny visual poison at work, the slippery image-seduction of propaganda. In short, he asks us to be conscious of the process.