Jinoos Taghizadeh
Tobacco Warehouse 1 & 2

Born in 1971, Tehran. Lives in Tehran.

Jinoos Taghizadeh's work travels through a variety of media including painting, collage, video and performance and deals with the problematic construction of collective identities in contemporary Iran. Her recent works look at the thirtieth anniversary of the Iranian revolution and its constant echoes in contemporary Iranian society.
In the hologram collages from the series Rock, Paper, Scissors (2009), Taghizadeh uses Iranian newspapers from the time of the revolution or immediately preceding it. She juxtaposes the newspapers with paradigmatic paintings from Western art history, such as the nightmares of Hieronymus Bosch, Bruegel's Flanders' village landscapes, or the French Revolution by Jacques-Louis David. The presence of Western 'masterpieces' alludes both to the covert influence of these powers on the political reality of Iran, and to the ambivalent stance of the Iranian government towards its international relations, wavering between a desire for recognition and an enclosed position. On each of the collages Taghizadeh has superimposed fragmented hand gestures with open palms, spread fingers or closed fists, taken from a children's game of fortune. The collages point to the disparity between the promises of the Revolution and the repressive political reality, whilst the use of holograms suggests the superficiality of representation and an interpretive ambiguity.
The video Good Night (2009) is an almost static shot of a room with the green, white and red colours of the Iranian flag. There is a crib, and beautiful singing rocks a baby to sleep. However, the lullabies are songs with a strong political content -revolutionary anthems from 1979. In the meantime, the songs' call for social justice and equality as the fuel for revolution has become problematic for the ruling class, and many of them have since been forbidden.