Behrang Karimi
Rotpeter: ‘Bild eines zur Dressur gezwungenen’
20 May to 15 July 2022

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For Moon Grove’s inaugural exhibition, the artist Behrang Karimi has been invited to produce a series of work for the gallery’s intimate domestic location.

A central theme to this project is the Karimi’s identification with Rotpeter, the ape in Franz Kafka’s ‘A Report to an Academy’. The story describes the German writer’s character, named by his captors after a bullet mark on his cheek, who learns to behave like a human, and subsequently presents to a scientific conference the story of how he effected his transformation. He tells of his former life in a West African jungle, in which a hunting expedition shoots and captures him. Throughout the story, the narrator reiterates that he learned his behaviour not out of any desire to be human, but only to provide himself with a means of escape from his cage.

With the exhibition titled ‘Rotpeter: Bild eines zur Dressur gezwungenen’ – which translates in English to ‘Red Peter: ‘Picture of one forced to dress’ – Karimi employs a similar Kafkaesque narrative to dwell on his own history and sense of adaptation and conversion. Outlined in part through the artist’s fragmented text ‘Father’ (shown below, which starts in German and ends in English), Karimi hints at his passage from a child in Iran to an adult painter in Germany, to being asked to make an exhibition in a private house in Manchester.

Other literary references in Karimi’s drawings and paintings come closer to Manchester via a specific homage to one of the city’s famous sons, the writer Anthony Burgess. Burgess’ identity as a British outsider with a semi-tragic life – the writer also came to success late – chimes with Karimi’s own position as a late-bloomer. Again, in the artist’s text ‘Father’, ‘Nadsat’ – the language, fictional register or argot used by the teenage gang members in Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Orange – is utilised by Karimi in connection with an analogues contemporary fear of fascism and moral turpitude that led Burgess to write his text.

Other references to historical writing by Dante and Goethe are evident alongside Karimi’s interest in Greek myth connected to chaos, pain and the beauty of destruction, again in place of extreme categories of moral certainty, which often lead to a lack of questioning and disinterested thought. Karimi has said: ‘It is important to create a counterpoint to the standard moral cages that we create for ourselves, similar to those represented by Rotpeter’s captors and the ape’s obedient and compliant psyche. Does progressive criticism exist anymore? Who is in the cage, and who is on the outside?’

In terms of ideas around nationalism, Burgess, whose experience in Malaysia formed an anti-national trait in the writer, Karimi has firmly asserted his position alongside Burgess and Kafka. He has said that he doesn’t feel like he belongs to any country: neither Iran, where he was born, nor Germany where he currently resides, or the UK and Manchester, where his work is currently being shown. Instead, like the two writers he loves, Karimi belongs to, or is a citizen of music, literature and art, with no affiliation to any specific place or political regime.

Behrang Karimi was born in 1980 in Schiraz, Iran and lives and works in Cologne, Germany.

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‘Father’
Behrang Karimi

Kalter Schweiß tropft langsam von der Decke und all das kommt wonach Du nie fragtest. Es ist Zeit einiges neu zu begreifen, so dass nach innen gerichtete Auge das die Ruhe bringt und Gleichgewicht sucht. Tropfend wird es rhythmisch und der Klang logisch. Bitte Ruhe nun.

Questions, carried like a bag of potatoes. Time to put the bag down. Nobody replies. Nobody is there. Why? Draw a square and try to sleep.

You try hard to write a letter, a request. It is a message that no one will read. It is naked from the beginning. Will anyone decide to read these sentences? What are they for? What are these drawings that you brought to us from Cologne about?

Hubris is masculine, swollen by ecstasy and fear. It is a complex labyrinth that can be great to become lost in. Wunderbar. It has always been a deadly wunderbar.

Here you go now into the crescent. Sun and Moon divided and still a silent force.

Sweaty, blood-filled swollen genitalia. Giving and taking false pictures, humming for forgiveness.

The reason to read everything is still the same; every step in the process needs to be considered, unturned stone after stone. There is no falling without a good hard landing. I love you as I can, and when I can, for God’s sake.

These fragments you wear are Lumpy, Drumpy and less Smellpy.

The bag of questions becomes smaller and smaller. Wrapped up in and armed with incorrect answers, you stop seeing. Can and could, false and fail, a hug, warm and light it shall be. The daily sound of empty bottles paves the road and fills the hole that I am born into.

How long does it take to read the distance between my arm and the end of the brush? My Father once said: ‘If you want to become an artist, you should be able to draw a tree without a pencil, or even an arm.’

Wise White Belly Father, you still sit in my ear.

When I searched for you for hours in pubs, every drunken man I saw resembled you. Minute after minute, sip after sip, new laughter. Truth brought us here.

Merci mon Ami.

Now I know that this was more than failure.

It was second to none.

Merci mon Ami.

When you saw light where there were no shadows, and we held each other’s hand to cross busy highways.

Merci mon Ami.

I will serve you Wine.

Forever.