Siamak Filizadeh
Mirza Riza Kirmani (Reza-e Shah Shekar)2014

Not on view

Color photograph of a long-haired man in an oversized plaid robe tied with rope, standing before a stone building with Persian movie posters and an orange vintage car

Artist or Maker: Siamak Filizadeh
Iran, born 1970
Title: Mirza Riza Kirmani (Reza-e Shah Shekar)
Date Made: 2014
Medium: Inkjet print
Dimensions: 59 1/16 × 39 3/8 × 1 1/4 in. (150.02 × 100.01 × 3.18 cm)
Credit Line: Purchased with funds provided by Kitzia and Richard Goodman through the 2016 Collectors Committee
Accession Number: M.2016.138.16
Classification: Photographs
Collecting Area: Art of the Middle East: Contemporary
Curatorial Notes: Mirza Riza Kirmani, the shah’s assassin, is the subject of several prints—the first of which shows him in the guise of Travis Bickle, the lonely and depressed antihero of the film Taxi Driver. Set in night-time Tehran, the rumpled and slightly deranged Mirza Riza stands outside a cinema advertising Taxi Driver, while parked behind him is an antique Paykan taxi.

Several surviving photographs of Mirza Riza (c. 1850–1896) picture him as a ragged, chained prisoner. Here, dressed in a tunic with blue jeans and only cloth shoes, Filizadeh depicts the assassin at a critical moment between his past as an impoverished, petty merchant who was jailed for his activist beliefs, and his present self, a man lost in the big city surrounded by neon signs and posters, wandering aimlessly with nowhere to go in the moments before he shoots the shah.
Selected Bibliography: Komaroff, Linda. In the Fields of Empty Days: The Intersection of Past and Present in Iranian Art. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Munich; New York: DelMonico Books-Prestel, 2018.
Copyright: © Siamak Filizadeh

Siamak Filizadeh
Mirza Riza Kirmani (Reza-e Shah Shekar)2014

Not on view

Artist or Maker: Siamak Filizadeh
Iran, born 1970
Title: Mirza Riza Kirmani (Reza-e Shah Shekar)
Date Made: 2014
Medium: Inkjet print
Dimensions: 59 1/16 × 39 3/8 × 1 1/4 in. (150.02 × 100.01 × 3.18 cm)
Credit Line: Purchased with funds provided by Kitzia and Richard Goodman through the 2016 Collectors Committee
Accession Number: M.2016.138.16
Classification: Photographs
Collecting Area: Art of the Middle East: Contemporary
Curatorial Notes: Mirza Riza Kirmani, the shah’s assassin, is the subject of several prints—the first of which shows him in the guise of Travis Bickle, the lonely and depressed antihero of the film Taxi Driver. Set in night-time Tehran, the rumpled and slightly deranged Mirza Riza stands outside a cinema advertising Taxi Driver, while parked behind him is an antique Paykan taxi.

Several surviving photographs of Mirza Riza (c. 1850–1896) picture him as a ragged, chained prisoner. Here, dressed in a tunic with blue jeans and only cloth shoes, Filizadeh depicts the assassin at a critical moment between his past as an impoverished, petty merchant who was jailed for his activist beliefs, and his present self, a man lost in the big city surrounded by neon signs and posters, wandering aimlessly with nowhere to go in the moments before he shoots the shah.
Selected Bibliography: Komaroff, Linda. In the Fields of Empty Days: The Intersection of Past and Present in Iranian Art. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Munich; New York: DelMonico Books-Prestel, 2018.