Fictionville is Rokni Haerizadeh’s first monograph and brings together four years of work. It is built around two sets of works: “Fictionville” (2009-) and a new series of drawings and animations made on the occasion of the 2013 Carnegie International. For Haerizadeh, life is rendered as a series of elaborate rituals, alternately richly comic, absurd, tragic, farcical, and finally, devastatingly familiar. The 34-year-old Dubai-based artist is perhaps best known for painterly tableaux whose subject matter draws from weddings, galas, murders, parades, funerals, riots, and revolutions. His human forms-often very large and wildly expressionist-function as a crooked lens onto the madness of contemporary society.
