Farhad Moshiri: Golden Love Super Deluxe (2002)

Overview

Encompassing painting, assemblage and sculpture, Farhad Moshiri’s mixed-media practice blends Eastern and Western aesthetics. Inspired by pop art and conceptualism, he usually draws his motifs from Western consumer culture (comics, advertising, pop music), and fuses them with Farsi calligraphy and traditional Persian art. Using found materials in his installations, and blending them with paintings, he finds ways of using the embedded cynicism in the material, in a bid to play with the idea of marketing and commodification.

Golden Love Super Deluxe, shown at the 2003 Sharjah Biennial, is an installation that looks like a mountain of objects, covered with gold leaf. A closer look reveals the familiar objects; robots, Mickey Mouse figurines and miniature cars. In this work, Moshiri highlights the need of the post-revolutionary Iranian society to show off in excess certain values borrowed from the west, even among the most traditional and religious families.