“I know Shahram since quite a long time, both as a friend and as an artist. We worked together on several projects: exhibitions, fairs, films, videos, performances and I have been for him at the same time producer, gallerist and publisher. I have always been fascinated by his approach to work, simple or complex as it may have been. His very particular behaviour, even handling the most controversial socio political issues his work strongly deals with, made me amuse whilst thinking, and laugh too. What sort of behaviour you may ask. A “performative” one, I gather, strongly driven by his humour and irony towards his work and his content. He was taking up physically through his body the entire burden of the consequences, related to the mostly quite dramatic content of his work. I was definitely loosing reference between his person and his personifications, finding myself suddenly in a sort of puppetry environment unable to identify puppets from puppeteer. The Islamic fundamentalist, the Kurdish activist, the Guerilla guy, the criminal from the Balkans, all “acting” in a setting almost out of their usual context, seem to be part of a geographical social and political demystification process. It looks like as if they are questioning their own status, making fun out of themselves. Their drama, becomes humour… I was posing all these thoughts of mine to Shahram whilst dining one evening at ‘Vino e Libri’ in Berlin, and suddenly everything became clearer in my mind, and I told him: ”you know Shahram, you are a clown.” We ended up deciding to start working on a book project. “I need a book”, Shahram said. My idea was to give to this project the structure of a dynamic presentation about him as a clown, enabling the reader to “navigate” amongst all his various characters, thus revealing they have not been conceived as mere stereotypes for the sake of political propaganda but, instead, just part of a “clownish” parody. By means of this the artist reveals himself towards issues such as political and social instability, migration, loss of cultural identities, as dramatic consequences of the globalisation process that makes many of us feel de-contextualized, and not belonging to anywhere anymore.”
[Excerpt from the foreword by Franco Marinotti]
