Leila Hekmat

Every utopia needs a pitch, and the more seductive its aesthetics, the spookier it gets. In The Dandelion School, Leila Hekmat imagines the recruitment center of a fictitious back-to-the-land sect. Entering its embrace, you might fall for its promises of warmth, healing rituals, and higher states of consciousness, but there’s a good chance it will end badly, like the cults of Charles Manson or of the preacher Jim Jones, who orchestrated a mass suicide of his followers.

Hekmat creates a space pledging liberation and one steeped in the countercultural pageantry of the 1970s—seductive, porous, and complicit, by now appropriated as a form of soft power by big corporations and reactionary forces alike. The installation’s centerpiece is a mystical-psychedelic promo video featuring the charismatic cult leader. This school’s lesson is that revolt, given enough velvet, becomes its own opposite: a dogma, a liturgy, an addiction.

Leila Hekmat (1981, Los Angeles, USA) is an artist who merges installation, performance, film, and music into vivid tableaux of baroque satire. Through handcrafted costumes and stage designs, she constructs worlds teeming with detail that subvert and play with social conventions and gender norms. Her works have recently been shown, among others, at Gropius Bau, Berlin; Haus am Waldsee, Berlin; HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin; and Berliner Festspiele. Hekmat lives in Berlin.