Rokni Haerizadeh

Rokni Haerizadeh was born in 1978 in Tehran, Iran. He studied painting at the University of Tehran, earning a BA in Fine Arts followed by an MA (also described as an MFA) in Painting, and also studied Persian literature; exact years for these degrees are not documented in available sources. Early in his career he won Second Prize at the Tehran Painting Biennial in 2003.

His mature practice takes found imagery, news photographs, television stills, and appropriated video, and reworks it through painting, drawing, and stop-motion animation, using satire to expose what museums describe as the absurdities embedded in tradition, ritual, and public gathering. Around 2009, after works belonging to Rokni and his brother Ramin were seized from a private collection in Tehran, the two went into self-imposed exile and settled in Dubai, where they were later joined by artist Hesam Rahmanian to form an ongoing collaborative practice often referred to as Ramin, Rokni, Hesam.

Institutional recognition followed quickly. He took part in the Sharjah Biennial in 2011, the Carnegie International in 2013, and Here and Elsewhere at the New Museum in 2014. In 2016 his work was included in the Guggenheim Museum's But a Storm Is Blowing From Paradise, and in 2017 he represented the United Arab Emirates at the National Pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale. The Frye Art Museum in Seattle presented a survey of the collaborative practice in 2019, and in 2022 the trio staged Parthenogenesis at the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, described as their first solo exhibition at a UAE institution. As of 2026, Rokni Haerizadeh continues to live and work in Dubai.

Institutional recognition has been fast and consistent. Curators and museums have repeatedly framed Haerizadeh's work, individually and with his collaborators, as a distinctive use of appropriated news and broadcast imagery to satirize social ritual, public ceremony, and political power. That reading carried him from a Sharjah Biennial appearance in 2011 through the Carnegie International in 2013, the New Museum's Here and Elsewhere in 2014, the Guggenheim's 2016 survey of Middle Eastern and North African contemporary art, and the United Arab Emirates' national pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. ArtReview named the Haerizadeh and Rahmanian collaboration to its Future Greats list in 2017. The collaborative practice with Ramin Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian also won the Han Nefkens Foundation and MACBA Award for Contemporary Art and, in 2017, the Officine Grandi Riparazioni Award in Turin. No verbatim, individually attributed critic quotation could be confirmed from the available sources, so none is reproduced here.

Haerizadeh's auction footprint is real but sparsely documented compared with his museum profile. The most fully sourced individual sale is Razm, a 2006 work, which sold at Christie's Dubai for USD 51,400 against an estimate of USD 22,000 to 28,000, reported by The Art Newspaper in coverage of a 2008 Christie's Dubai sale; the exact sale date within that season is not specified in the source. Separately, a gallery report describes a Christie's Dubai sale in around March 2008 of USD 221,000 as having broken his personal auction record, but that account does not name the work or give an exact day, so it should be treated as a reported figure rather than a fully verified one. A 2011 Forbes piece noted that his canvases had "recently surpassed the $50,000 mark at auctions," consistent with the documented range. His work has also appeared at Sotheby's, Tehran Auction, and Millon in Paris. There is no catalogue raisonne, and a meaningful share of his output since 2009 is collaborative with Ramin Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian, which complicates any simple read of an individual price history.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Rokni Haerizadeh, and authenticity questions are generally resolved through his representing galleries rather than a published reference work. Because a substantial part of his practice since 2009 has been produced jointly with Ramin Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian, collectors should confirm whether a given piece is an individual work or part of the collaborative project, since this affects both attribution and comparables. His public auction record is thin and unevenly reported: the best-documented individual sale, at roughly USD 51,000, sits well below a separately reported but underdocumented USD 221,000 figure, and the gap between the two is a reminder to verify any single quoted price against primary auction-house records before treating it as a market benchmark.