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Surcharge

Hamed Noori

Surcharge

Digital Photagraphy

15 × 15 cm

Location: London, United Kingdom

https://www.artransfer.com/web/image/product.template/28563/image_1920?unique=ce8944f

300 € 300.0 EUR 300 €

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About the artwork

In his photographic series Surcharge, Hamed Noori hijacks the image of the postal stamp - a symbol of authority, circulation and official communication - to question notions of power, memory and value in a globalized world. Each image, conceived as an autonomous digital photograph, presents a square of four meticulously reworked antique stamps: portraits of leaders, military or political figures, altered by color, superimposition and repetition. Through this visual manipulation, Noori gives these symbols of an administrative past a new critical charge, where the stamp becomes a metaphor for the transmission, or distortion, of history. The rigorous composition, centered on a deep black background, isolates each block like a precious artifact. This staging evokes both the museum and the catalog, but also the fragility of an archive threatened with erasure. The title Surcharge refers both to the philatelic practice of reprinting or modifying the value of a stamp, and to a symbolic surcharge: that of ideologies, national narratives and fixed identities. In this way, Noori revisits the materiality of power, highlighting how even the tiniest image can become an instrument of domination or resistance.

Expert opinion

With Surcharge, Hamed Noori demonstrates a remarkable mastery of symbolic language and photographic composition. By transforming collector's items into surfaces for political reflection, he creates a dialogue between aesthetics and criticism, history and contemporaneity. Here, the artist takes up the codes of Persian miniature and Islamic geometry - symmetry, repetition, precision - to construct a visual discourse on colonial memory and the persistence of hierarchies of power in representations. The formal elegance of the series contrasts with its conceptual charge: the beauty of the image draws the eye, but its repetitive structure reveals a disquieting uniformity, that of control and reproduction. Through digital manipulation, Noori reactivates the stamp as a trace of the past that has become a sign of the present: the circulation of the image becomes a political act. Surcharge thus stands out as a work of great intellectual density, in which every detail - color, framing, motif - contributes to a meditation on the way societies print, collect and rewrite their own narratives.

About the artist

Hamed Noori (b. 1979, Mashhad, Iran) is an Iranian-American multidisciplinary artist based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose practice lies at the crossroads of photography, collage, video and sculpture. Trained at Kashan University of the Arts (Bachelor of Applied Arts, 2007), he developed an in-depth knowledge of traditional Iranian forms and techniques before pursuing a Master's degree in "Art in Context" at Berlin University of the Arts (2010). Born and raised in Mashhad, he left Iran for Germany in 2009, where his artistic approach underwent a profound change: from the artisanal language inherited from Persian culture, he moved towards a conceptual and multimedia approach, rooted in contemporaneity. Noori's work explores the recurring geometric structures and motifs of Islamic art, which he places in tension with the Western traditions of landscape photography and observation of the natural world. By fusing these two visual heritages - Persian geometric rigor and Western spatial perception - he creates a poetic universe where abstraction becomes a space for intercultural dialogue. Hamed Noori is the recipient of several major awards, including the Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship (2021), the MASS MoCA A4A Grant, and residencies at the Boston Center for the Arts (since 2021) and Walkaway House (North Adams, MA). His work has been exhibited in prestigious international institutions, including the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (Arizona), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Bates College Museum of Art (Across Common Grounds exhibition, 2025), Passerelle Centre d'art contemporain (Brest), Hillyer Art Space (Washington D.C.), as well as the 11th National Iranian Photography Biennial (Teheran) and the MADATAC Festival (Madrid). In 2025, he will also present an exhibition at London's Photographers' Gallery entitled Reimagined Landscapes. In a body of work where the precision of geometric drawing meets the sensitivity of the photographic medium, Hamed Noori questions the way in which space, memory and culture are translated visually. His work embodies a bridge between heritage and modernity, between East and West, placing perception and contemplation at the heart of contemporary creation.

Additional info

Framed

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