Lawrie Shabibi is pleased to announce No Scheherazade by Farhad Ahrarnia, his fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. Comprising works in Ahrarnia’s signature techniques of embroidered photography and wood inlay against an immersive backdrop inspired by Prince’s 1987 video Sign O’ The Times, No Scheherazade is a dissection/celebration of Princess Diana, Keith Haring and all things 80’s.
The exhibition title alludes to the legendary Scheherazade, the Iranian narrator of 'The Thousand and One Nights'. A princess trapped in a fated marriage, Scheherazade used whatever tools were at her disposal, and so became immortalised in popular culture. Her husband King Shahryar had vowed that he will execute a new bride every morning. Therefore, over a course of 1,001 nights, Scheherazade told her husband a story, stopping at dawn with a cliffhanger, forcing him to keep her alive for another day.
Both huge celebrities of the time, Keith Haring and Princess Diana embodied and contained the aesthetics of the era. Throughout the later 1980s and 1990s, Diana used clothing and fashion to express her contemporaneity and promote certain values and aesthetics, which in turn connected her with the widest possible audience. Haring also used clothing as a means - dressing people such as Madonna and Grace Jones, celebrities in the New York scene of the time using textiles and the body to bring his iconic visual gestures to the masses, as anyone wearing a Keith Haring t-shirt or using a Keith Haring mug would know.
By deliberately limiting the visual information and by concentrating on certain aspects, Ahrarnia plays with the power of brand recognition and engages directly with themes of fashion and clothing, an undercurrent in his previous work which here comes to the fore. And God Saved the Queen are portraits of Diana, a modern-day legendary princess. Ahrarnia uses press images of Diana wearing her famous outfits, always cropping the image to hide her face, instead focussing on her bold choice of blazer or dress, which in turn are embroidered with designs drawn from artworks of Keith Haring. It is so obviously Diana, that one does not need to even see her face to know exactly who it is. Likewise, the designs are obviously Haring’s.
The flip side of the 80s glitz - the spectre of HIV and AIDS - haunted that decade and the early 1990s. Haring was himself a casualty, though not before using his fame and brand recognition to bring attention to the epidemic. Diana, meanwhile, was the first high profile individual to bridge and go beyond what was a taboo and to humanize the epidemic. By using her hands, providing a sense of touch, she normalized the process of how to handle a person suffering from HIV.
In Touch, Composition with Left Hand, hands in different shades of wood taken from different kinds of tree, are superimposed on each other. Smaller wood inlaid works focus on individual fingers and thumbs, which appear to be cut, alluding to the cropping we see on the And God Saved the Queen.
Like A Prayer uses traditional Iranian fabrics with Haring-inspired embroidered motifs - surreally deformed bodies and references to cutting, alludes to the 1989 track by Madonna, one of the singer’s most iconic, if controversial, singles.
