There are European literary precedents informing Reza Aramesh’s work that offer an insight into his subject matter and method.  Taken together with his origins in the Middle East a fascinating convergence of influences emerges.

 

The 20th century existentialist writers Jean Genet and Albert Camus provide a schema of ideas that both concern the place of the outsider in society, detached from its moral norms but emotionally charged.  Genet, whose writings describe the cloying stylisation of power in its most absurd extreme is the prisoner of the establishment whose celebration of society’s taboos sets him free. Camus, the Algerian interloper onto European territory, describes the individual as an onlooker, one who chronicles their own state of being in the context of others from whom they are disassociated. Thirdly, Bertolt Brecht, essentially the contemporary of Camus and Genet, who saw society as a manifestation of political values and placed an emphasis on the collective endeavour rather than the condition of the individual.