Each refers to the
other as ‘the head of the snake
—Arundhati Roy, The algebra of infinite justice
“I’ve been telling people it’s a picture of Disneyland,” Anto Yeldezian says to me when we meet to talk about the works in his solo show Arena. He is referring to the stippled image screen-printed messily in cornflower blue over the lower third of Across Words (2025), the small painting hung in the vestibule of Coastal Signs in downtown Tāmaki Makaurau. The work also features a printed screenshot of the New York Times website pasted onto a wood panel, the newspaper’s masthead legible but diminutive beneath a filmy sweep of blue acrylic and a smoggy palimpsest of found image and painted mark. “It’s actually a photograph taken by an armed guard overlooking a public square in Baghdad,” he admits, “but at a certain point, the origins are meaningless.”
Origins are meaningless because they share a nervous system. Arena features a slipstream of images and motifs, cribbed and reproduced from sources that include drone interfaces, military simulations and video games, and other corners of the artist’s extensive digital archives. All, in some way, signify a wobbly phantasm of the Middle East—as region of perpetual conflict and coiled insurgency; as playground for high-tech warfare; as arena (n): sand-strewn place of war, from the Roman practice of spreading sand over the ground of amphitheatres in order to soak up spilled blood. Gameboards order this glut; arenas in miniature that act as compositional devices and a visual shorthand for conflict and its futility. “It might not look like it on the chaotic surface, but I have become more selective about the kinds of mark-making techniques that I combine to configure these paintings,” Yeldezian explains. “But as someone with all these pictures and things I want to try, it’s a genuine fight for me, consolidating those two impulses. Games and the idea of rules, and appearing to adhere to them, became the reason for this show.”
Fanged and cross-eyed pythons grin out of the canvases, waiting to catch a gaze to send back to square one. Grilles of noughts and crosses make cages on the topmost surface of several paintings, the Xs splicing the bellies of the Os, as if in an outburst of bad sportsmanship over the world’s most pointless game. Into these schemas Yeldezian frenziedly works different media forms and image treatments—the drawn, stamped, stencilled, tagged, printed—the official narratives and illicit marks. His debt to pop art is clear. Warhol’s Triple Elvis appears, drawn in smoky charcoal onto the unstretched drop-cloth of Don’t Welcome Me Mat (2025) beneath rows of colourful Twister orbs, like staggering zombies heaving their heavy limbs to play. Looking at the grand chess-board of Civilisation (The Game) (2024), one might think of the works Robert Rauschenberg produced as part of the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI) project, for which is toured and documented, in his words, “societies less familiar with non-political ideas or communicating worldly [sic] through art”[01]—the large, haphazard arrangements overflowing with silk-screened images of carotids, political icons and poultry.
The speed with which they could process images with printmaking was crucial to the pop artists. It allowed them to keep pace with a culture moving breakneck and proliferating imagery at an unprecedented rate. You can sense a similar desire for velocity in Yeldezian’s paintings. He tells me he spent much of the last year teaching himself silk-screening at the small basin in his shared studio, learning to prepare the screens, and splashing out on the proper acrylic pigments and emulsions. “It was still very wabi sabi,” he says. Prints were coming out blotchy, the pigment leaking at the edges and stipples merging as if undergoing meiosis—more surface effect than usable representations. “But that was my buy-in, really, because all this painterly slippage was happening.”
I ask about one such slippage: the dark clot on the artist’s top lip in the self-portrait printed onto one of the chess squares in Civilisation (The Game). Or had he intentionally given himself this Saddam Hussein-esque facial hair? Hussein’s own portrait appears in Wall Games (2024), reproduced from an image of a street mural of the kind that is found all over the Middle East. He’s disappearing, face half rubbed away, floating in a field of desert-storm pink and poor and parasocial imagery—silhouetted camels, palm trees, fighter jets, Arabic script and more twining pythons. What’s left is Hussein’s iconography: aviators, beret, distinctive moustache. Yeldezian laughs at my question. The screen had collapsed as he pushed the pigments through its mesh, in just the right place so as to suggest this cartoonish family resemblance to the former Iraqi President— revolutionary hero or war criminal, depending on your point of view. “It was perfect,” Yeldezian says.
This solitary instance of self-portraiture mirrors that of Expat (2023), a small canvas replicating the ID page of the artist’s New Zealand passport, exhibited in Yeldezian’s last solo exhibition, Monument Valley. His biographical information is painted in uniform letters and his photograph manipulated, copied from a picture generated with a Snapchat filter so that his face has the smooth planes and simplified features of an animation. Yeldezian describes this work as his tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of the situation he finds himself in as an artist of his complicated heritage in an Aotearoa already layered in identity politics. Most institutions prioritise practices in which the country’s bicultural history is legible, though tauiwi artists might gain access to this dyad through careful plays of a ‘third’ identity. If Expat is a nod to this dynamic, then the self-portrait (self-defacement) in Arena, styled as a Twitch streamer’s webcam thumbnail, feels like a dare from Yeldezian to his viewers to see him in the spectres of his origins, to identify him with the political subject whose image, to many, signifies the Islamist threat.
“I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume that Sabsabi also looked at, or was at least peripherally influenced by, the murals,” Yeldezian speculates, our conversation turning to Khaled Sabsabi, and the work cited by Creative Australia as their reason for cancelling the artist’s planned 2026 Venice Biennale project. You (2007) suggests a similar taboo identification to that of Yeldezian’s self-portrait. It’s a video installation in which footage of Hassan Nasrallah, secretary-general of Hezbollah until his assassination by the Israeli Defense Forces in September last year, is projected in a tile-like multi- channel formation, his features obliterated by a glaring white light that resembles the effects of deterioration on the murals. When Yeldezian speaks of these murals, it’s as images that wear the movement and fractures of their political hopes and horizons openly: “They’re everywhere in the Middle East and just so beautiful,” he says. “They’ve often been shot at or graffitied over, both by locals and invading forces. They fall apart as expressions of people’s favour. With the image of Saddam in particular, he’s worn away, so he vaguely looks like some Tom of Finland leather daddy. It’s another of these slips. I find it hilarious.”
Sabsabi’s critics interpreted the white light as holy: it’s the white light of the coming jihad, which is coming from outside of history. The artist’s treatment by Creative Australia, and, likewise, the censorship of many pro-Palestinian artists over the past sixteen months, has shown how readily the creative and political establishment will seize the phantasmal, timeless image of the infidel Middle East. It has also laid bare the rules of participation in contemporary art and the political limits of ‘origins’ in identity politics. It’s in this arena that Yeldezian makes his subtle plays, knowing full well it’s a trap. “The aim is to avoid crashing into your own tail,” he says, speaking about the trailing lines of pink pigment in Across Words, which he’d made by tilting the board while the paint was still wet, an action he based on the Snake game that came preinstalled on old Nokias. This can be quite difficult, as any foreign-policy expert will tell you.
*
Part-way through the development of the exhibition, Yeldezian had to move studios. He vacated his small, shared space with the sink and moved into a large basement with no running water. You need running water to make silk-screens, so his experiments in printmaking were aborted with half of the works still to be made. “The three small collage works and the big drop-cloth piece arose out of being surrounded by all the detritus and ephemera, leftovers from the show’s production,” he said. “Partly out of frustration, I guess, I became interested in the things that happen on the floor of the studio, these incidental forms of printing.”
This shift can be felt in the show. The more time I spent looking at the paintings, the more fixated I became on a thump I recognised within them: a persistent arrhythmia of falling Lockheed Martin logos and relief packages, the bloodied boot-prints and the edict/siren-cry of Raid Raid Raid Raid stamped over and again, all seeming to assert this act of painting as a downward force. Then there are the two emphatic drops of waxy scarlet paint in Across Words, like the red defilement of the newspaper’s masthead as The New York War TCrimes by pro-Palestine activists protesting its portrayal of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The painting, too, subjects the rag to its fate: the legacy publication with its passive voice and yesterday’s news enters a lower class of circulation among the studio refuse, useful perhaps for cleaning the window glass or covering the floor.
“Burial is important,” Yeldezian says when I share this with him. “I’m interested in what images get buried in others. One of the images that the whole show hinges around comes from what was called the ‘flour massacre’ in the news. The only footage as far as the Western media was concerned was coming from the IDF—aerial drone footage of Gazans rushing all at once to reach the aid, but also running away because they’re getting shot at. Those images made people look like an insect infestation. It was in trying not to reproduce this image directly that I ended up with so much of what’s in the show … Make of that what you will.”
What can you make of such gruesome distortions, now ‘boring scarecrows’ staked in the collective visual field?[02] An ad for a Disney cruise follows news of the latest war crime. Politicians show off plans for holiday resorts to be built on felled cities and the bones of the Palestinian dead. You play the daily Wordle while the columnists manufacture consent. Stray bullets find their way into the bodies of three-year-old young ladies.[03] Of the many conflict images Yeldezian does reproduce, most come from drone interfaces, or, in the case of No Players Online (2024), from the popular video game Full Spectrum Warrior, and Virtual Iraq, a war simulation therapy programme used by the U.S. military to treat symptoms of PTSD in returned soldiers. Real or virtual—you never really know which. They topple into one another. Virtual Iraq is modelled on Full Spectrum Warrior, and Full Spectrum Warrior was developed with support from the US Army’s Science and Technology division, looking to see if gaming technology was a viable complement to traditional training procedures; players of the game are equipped with weaponry modelled on the arsenal recruits could expect to use in real combat. Terrible chickens and terrible eggs. Here’s more: the Israeli Defense Forces’ Urban Warfare Training Center known colloquially to the soldiers who drill there as ‘Mini Gaza’, which was built to emulate the narrow, logicless alleyways of Gaza’s cities and refugee camps; a call to prayer plays five times a day over speakers, and murals to the martyred decorate its walls.
I want to write that Yeldezian ‘intervenes in’ or ‘disrupts’ this frictionless churn of junk and violence that he paints within and about, but only because that’s the language that comes easily to describe the work of the artist. Truthfully, I don’t wholly believe that’s what his paintings are doing, nor do I think he believes that’s what he’s doing. Look more closely at Across Words and you notice the browser tab reads ‘Manage Your Subscription’. The artist also wonders if boycotting is enough.
Maybe it’s something, if never enough, that these paintings “feel the catastrophe,” to borrow Nan Goldin’s phrase.[04] Dehumanisation is a way of seeing. It turns people into ants and warfare into games. And Arena doesn’t let us out of it. We might think, “I feel bombarded by these images”—and then we might hear ourselves.
