Spiderman's traurige Wahrheit

Ashkan Mohammadi, born in Teheran in 1984, now (2002) lives in Kassel, where he goes to school. His drawings and comics cover a wide range of forms, from tiny sketches to complete stories, and display a highly individual use of artistic and narrative techniques. With their reticent questions and striking slogans, they describe aspects of a teen universe whose points of reference can only be defined retrospectively with the coordinates parents/school/refugee homes/student flat-sharing.

His manner of production, which can best be compared with a DIY fanzine structure, maintains an extremely private and concrete focus, making Mahammadi resistant to the anti-subversive offers of politics and the culture business as regards the self-representation of minorities. It allows him to interrogate through artistic means, a German society that regulates and exploits migration by means of everyday apartheid policies. The pictures and texts remain private and communicable, and can thus be read – think “divergent capitalism” here – as an appropriate, subversive form of universalism.