Internationally renowned artist Mohsen Keiany has produced a new body of artwork, which examines how over-exposure to the experience of violence and its media representation has left us individually and selectively desensitised.

The “Desensitised artist.” is Keiany’s most recent body of work. It is made up of a collection of paintings dealing with war and conflict. The paintings are in part autobiographical and draw upon the authentic experiences of the artist’s early life to represent historic tragic events, though also offer a vision of the experiences of victims of terror today.

Diverging from much of Keiany’s earlier work, which explored a softer connection between war and spirituality, “Desensitised Artist” is a more provocative collection. The paintings create a visual narrative which jumps from battlefields of the Iran-Iraq War (where the artist fought as a fourteen-year-old child soldier from 1984 – 88) to recent incidences of violence from across the globe, from the Middle East, USA, India, Pakistan, France, Turkey, Germany and also to where the artist lives in the UK (the attacks in Manchester and Westminster attacks).

At the core of these works we see the transformation of human beings into dehumanised killing machines. The works show how the directives of authoritarian regimes, through propaganda, mass media and religious manipulation, effectively convert flesh and blood individuals into metallic weapons of destruction.