"[1] Haerizadeh gained international attention during the mid-2000s for his paintings that brought together, on canvas, his observations about social or public gatherings in Iran – particularly weddings, religious festivals, funerals and banquets – and reveal the hedonistic, ritualised or violent sides of human nature that are buried in such spectacles.
Taking its title from the 1968 play Shahr-E Qesseh (‘City of Tales’) by Bijan Mofid, Fictionville "places […] emphasis on the equalizing effect of news cycles"[3] and attempts to show how the media equates violence and popular protest with entertainment, interspersed with the spectacles of state visits and official pomp.
Transforming the ‘characters’ contained in these stills into human-animal hybrids or mocking clownish figures, and their surroundings into ludicrous landscapes, "It is via the act of deliberate deformation that the work is anchored in the hand and body of the artist, and finally that the public is rendered private.
Haerizadeh subverted thousands of stills taken from news network coverage and amateur videos of the 2009 post-election riots in Tehran into a theatrical drama of human-animal hybrids.
In an intoxicating popular culture built on protest, self-made videos and civilian heroes, reality, the work seems to suggest, has been lost in this search for almost religious moral certitude on both sides of the struggle.
Later that year they staged their second collaborative exhibition at Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, The Exquisite Corpse Shall Drink The New Wine, described in the press as a "a spectacular visual orgy".