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According to his critics, Shoja Azari is "blasphemous." Shoja Azari has "marred the sacred." But Shoja Azari is a controversialist. Shoja Azari is counting on us for such salacious accusations. For it is only at that very moment of our self-righteous shock that we are awakened long enough to bear witness to the calamities of repression and tyranny masked by the familiar and the sacred.

"Icons," the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York City, at the Leila Taghinia-Heller Gallery, attempts to deconstruct centuries of iconography via his video paintings, using a formal and stylistic approach that merges the composition of the canvas with the visual movements of film.

Consisting of two parts, the show starts with homage to coffee house paintings inspired by The Day of the Last Judgment by Mohammad Modabber, who is one of the masters of this genre. Azari’s Coffee House Painting, 2009, is a reimagining of the revered artistic tradition of vernacular and visual storytelling in Iran and in Shi’ism developed late in the Qajar period (1794-1925). The painted images of epic Persian myths and legends and re-imagined scenes of heroic battles and the afterlife are an invitation for the viewer to observe the familiar, the traditional, and the homely. But upon closer observation, visual movements come to life depicting contemporary acts of violence. Scenes of war in Iraq and Palestine, images of brutality in Abu Gharib prison, and clips of the 2009 election demonstrations in Iran are set to piercing sounds of explosions mixed with the fervent sermons of fanatical clerics.

The second part of the show goes one step further in exploring the Shi’i tradition of iconography and the de-iconification of these icons at the repressive hands of the Islamic Republic. Icons, 2010, is a series of five video portraits on light boxes of the omnipresent 19th century folk portraits of Shi’i saints. In Azari’s hands, the uncontested, bearded faces and piercing gazes of these holy saints have been replaced by the faces of contemporary women (including this writer’s face) while keeping the rest of the masculine attributes intact. These altered still images will indeed jar. But only upon realization that they also emanate subtle and nuanced movements through blink of the eyes or swelling of the eyes with tears do we become aware of the real transgression: these sacred icons have been turned into weapons of oppression and brutality against the very people who revered them. Azari has pierced through the mask, and in his silent gestures we witness “a cry of defiance, the iconography of a revolt against the obscenity of violence done in the name of or against those who hold these pictures sacred,” as literature professor Hamid Dabashi puts it in a catalogue essay.

An astute auteur of film, Azari’s reimagining of the projected and printed image serve as his mighty pen to script a love-letter to the revered iconography in solidarity against the obscene violence inflicted in the name of the sacred.