An Investigation into Nikzad Nodjumi’s Works of Art Based on Carnival Theory by Mikhail Bakhtin

Abstract                                                The world has faced complicated upheavals nowadays. Man has always tried to forsake these disasters and calamities and find an answer for them. He looks for a way to express these contrasts and conflicts in warning, intricate and thought provoking works of art. Nikzad Nodjoumi, one of the contemporary artists shows these oppositions by grotesque bodies in pieces, in a carnivalesque form. His work challenges the dominant power and demonstrate it with various elements. These works have specific qualifications which can be seen in Mikhail Bakhtin’s Carnival theory. Carnivalization in Literature is one of the most prominent ideas of Bakhtin which is a subsidiary of folk culture and irony. The inversion of the dominant hierarchy and common norms is one of the main functions of carnival. So, because of propinquity of Bakhtin’s ideas and the themes of these works, it is possible to investigate qualifications which focus on the appearance of Carnival perception of the world in Nodjumi’s works of art. Here, the question is how this power irony in Nodjumi’s artworks is illustrated. Establishing a relationship between everyday life affairs like carnival and power with Art, in a Bakhtinian reading of carnival, is the aim of this research. In his paintings, the contrast of formal with informal spaces and antonym affairs is seen. This contrast appears via a body in pieces and emergence of defective, odd and hybrid characters, manipulation of body organs and its repetition, integrating human body with animal body (human-animal), doing ordinary and trashy works, transvestitism and body cuts in a half-clownish format (Harlequin). This study is accomplished with library references in a descriptive- analytic method.