Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, Hesam Rahmanian / (LA)HORDE

Opening on 5 April at 6 pm.
At 7 pm, Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian talk about their film Dance after the Revolution, from Tehran to L.A. and back and Take a poiesis capsule with a glass of shadow on an empty stomach, their new exhibition at NYU Abu Dhabi.

In recent years dance has been central in our interests, evident in the exhibitions from Isabel Lewis and Trajal Harrell, for example. This programmatic theme continues with this six-week long exhibition. While Bondy and Dance after the Revolution, from Tehran to L.A. and back are two very different films, they both demonstrate how dance can bring together communities.

(LA)HORDE
Bondy, 2017, 15:53 min

Bondy is a city to the north-east of Paris which is part of the Parisian banlieue (Kylian Mbappé is its most famous citizen). Bondy and the Centre National de la Danse in Pantin commissioned French collective (LA)HORDE to create a portrait of the city using the means of dance. The result is the almost sixteen-minute film Bondy. Around fifty people took part in the project, including a local team of cheerleaders, dance enthusiasts from a club of retired people, swimmers from the local synchronised swimming club, a group of motorcyclists as well as kids on Tiktok. The film runs without commentary; we see how dance connects different people and creates common ground.

'We stand for a very eclectic vision of dance. For us, there is no such thing as classical dance, modern dance, urban or viral dance on TikTok. We need to get rid of these hierarchies. From our point of view, as soon as the body is staged and tells a story, it's dance. It's in a multitude of places: at birthday parties, in clubs, on social networks, in theatres. We live in a time when people are turning in on themselves, but we are convinced that the body is a vector for encounters, a vector for affirmation and a kind of refuge; this is why dance is booming.’ LA(HORDE), franceinfo: culture

Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, Hesam Rahmanian
Dance after the Revolution, from Tehran to L.A., and back, 2020, 36:30 min

Dance after the Revolution, from Tehran to L.A., and back is a film by Dubai-based Iranian artists Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian. The film traces an extraordinary story that goes, in a very abbreviated form, as follows: due to the Islamic revolution of 1978/79, the dancer, choreographer and entertainer Mohammad Khordadian leaves his country of Iran and settles in Los Angeles. There he earns his living by dancing for the Iranian community in exile. At the same time, he produces videos in which he demonstrates how Persian-Arabic folk dance, influenced by cabaret, can be combined with Jane Fonda's aerobics. These instructional videos are smuggled back to Iran hidden on VHS tapes, go viral and are passed on, copied countless times, from hand to hand. Khordadian's dance becomes the most popular folk dance in Iran – where dancing in public is strictly forbidden and punishable by law to this day. Today, everyone knows his dance, as the film shows at the end using numerous YouTube clips. In 2006, Khordadian, who lives in Istanbul, came out as homosexual in a television interview. Khordadian, known as the ‘King of Dance’, often incorporates humour in his dance and bends gender roles by inspiring men to perform movements traditionally reserved for women. 'Let's dance up a storm like Khordadian!'

Biographies:

(LA)HORDE is a collective founded in Marseille in 2013 consisting of Marine Brutti (*1985), Jonathan Debrouwer (*1985) and Arthur Harel (*1990). They work with dancers from a wide variety of backgrounds, with amateurs, marginalised people, athletes, political actors, but also with artists such as recently for Madonna. The aim is always to uncover the emotional and political power of the body through dance. (LA)HORDE has directed the Ballet national de Marseille since 2019.

The three Iranian artists Ramin Haerizadeh (*1975), Rokni Haerizadeh (*1978) and Hesam Rahmanian (*1980) have been working together since 2009. The trio live in exile in Dubai. They have shown their work internationally, including at the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery in 2022 and 2024, at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt am Main and at the 22nd Sydney Biennial in Australia in 2020, at Officine Grandi Riparazioni (OGR) in Turin in 2018, at MACBA in Barcelona in 2017 and the Liverpool Biennial in 2016. The collective showed their exhibition Slice a Slanted Arc Into Dry Paper Sky at Kunsthalle Zürich in 2015.