Organised by assistant curator Ruth Erickson with curatorial assistant Jeffrey De Blois
16 December 2015 - 27 March 2016
The Birthday Party is the trio's first museum exhibition in the USA and borrows its title from a 1953 play by Nobel prize winning English writer Harold Pinter, a surreal comedy about a party organised as a ploy to get the character to sit down. The Haerizadeh brothers and Rahmanian began their version as a kind of a party-cum-performance in August at Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde. During the performance, they shuffled around the space in costumes made of long prayer robes that obscured their vision, spilling paint across a floor they constructed, while unwrapping presents and making accumulative sculptures out of their contents.
In the current installation at the ICA, they bring together some of the remnants from the performance - the painted floor, the sculptures, and the video documentation - with a number of new works and a selection of works by other artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Bahman Mohassess, Ree Morton and Hassan Sharif.