contemporary art

Shoot First Make Friends Later
Shirin Aliabadi & Farhad Moshiri
2006

Iranian art couple Farhad Moshiri and Shirin Aliabadi created the project “Operation Supermarket”. It consists of a series of commodity advertisements and packages mixing “poetry with detergent” as the artists describe. The emphasis is on the commodification of mainstream media traits of the Middle East, but also on a wry parody of the mythical hopes still pinned on the commodity itself as a capitalist agent for change.

The series points out the pervasive effect of Western global capitalism on the everyday life of the general public and how the citizens start to define themselves as persons by what they take from the shelves of the marketplace. These works offer manipulated packages of common household objects available at any common supermarket in the world. The title “Supermarket” suggests an allusion to global consumerism and products as the vehicles of its manifestation as the new figure of Empire.

We Are All Americans
2006

The work titled “We are all Americans” suggests our fascination with everything American. This Americanization of a society is defined by the ratio of commodity fetishism to the range of product accessibility. Global corporations, when localizing their advertisements, adapt their jingles to the local cultural attributes. Thus poetry with detergent is also a reference to Iranian oral culture and its obsession with poetry, a tradition deeply rooted in Iranian society. The artists re-brand and transform these items into a discourse on capitalism. The new guise of the image, altered from an advertisement to an artwork, consequently modifies the way the image is encountered and discussed. The artists deploy these ready-made advertisements as a platform for smuggling a new content. The immediate quality of these images – as parts of a common global image-repertoire – are used to convey a differentiated message in a fashion that contradicts their raison d’etre.

Families Ask Why
2006

In his work, Moshiri makes direct reference to everything kitsch, as the post-colonial monuments of contemporary culture of Iran and the region. He refers to the post-revolutionary drawing books, water fountains at the intersections and main squares of the cities, the furniture of the parvenu, and the Western and Westernized brands of products. But nevertheless these works go way beyond the local boundaries. With consumerism as a global tool of expression, our lexicon of products forms the vocabulary of our times. The lines of carts behind the supermarket register suggest a modern form of communication. Shoot first, make friends later is the product of a global paranoia and people killing people is what that makes everyday headlines. In fact some of them do remind us of the postcards of demonstrations outside WTO summits. And perhaps the artists are raising the question of how can we stop the famine in Africa with the choice of our soap and how can our bathroom shelf criticize out government? How can we protest with the brand of our underwear and how can we ask for forgiveness with the choice of our moisturizers. And with our preferred set of detergents we express our love, asking: “MY SOUL, MY UNIVERSE, WHERE WERE YOU ALL THOSE DAYS”