Sabrina Amrani is pleased to present Sound Objects; Unsound Times, Babak Golkar's fourth solo exhibition at the gallery.
The voice—and that visceral, primal energy of the scream—has all but lost its place today. To scream in the street is improper, online it dissolves into noise, and in intimacy it becomes emptiness. Yet the scream is one of our most elemental gestures: a tearing of the throat that demands, protests, liberates. It is the sound of refusal, but also the sound of pain. It is both protest and symptom. Where, and how, can one scream when every channel is co-opted, conditioned, or censored?
In 2012, Babak Golkar began his Scream Pots, wheel-thrown clay vessels conceived as containers for the scream. Their creation emerged from a decisive gesture: an insistence that the viewer not only contemplate an object but complete it through action. This primordial move shifted the work from representation to performance, from artifact to device. The Scream Pot is not fully realized until the breath falters, the diaphragm contracts, and the roar is surrendered to clay. It is at once vessel and instrument, object and script, a container for sound that both permits and neutralizes its release.
In Sound Objects; Unsound Times, a single Scream Pot is presented in the empty gallery space. Visitors are admitted one at a time, confronted with the vessel in solitude. This enforced isolation heightens the theatricality of the encounter: the gallery becomes a stage, the visitor a performer, the act of screaming both private and exposed. Without the buffer of the crowd, hesitation and impulse alike are amplified. What unfolds is less an exhibition than a ritual of complicity, where the silence of the room and the presence of the pot together frame the visitor within a system of vulnerability, surveillance, and self-disclosure.
The pot functions as both refuge and trap. It promises catharsis, yet enforces its own conditions. Like a microphone that magnifies but disciplines, or a digital feed that offers voice while neutralizing dissent, it embodies the paradox of our time: the more expression is encouraged, the more it is absorbed and contained.
Clay intensifies this contradiction. As earth, it is ancient and grounding; as vessel, it is fragile yet enduring. It absorbs sound yet refuses to release it. It is simultaneously open and closed, receptive and indifferent. In surrendering one’s voice to clay, the scream is both enacted and annulled—an echo that cannot escape.
The Scream Pot insists that we inhabit this tension. At a time when collective cries vanish into the ether of screens and political systems, the act of screaming into a silent object resonates with fresh urgency. It is a promise of freedom exercised within the limits of containment, an intimate roar transformed into mute matter.
The invitation is simple: approach, hold the object, deposit your voice. No instructions, only impulse. Yet in that impulse lies the work’s force: a moment where protest and silence, freedom and regulation, catharsis and impotence meet. The scream, though muffled, exists. The voice, though contained, is uttered. And the act, though bounded, leaves its trace within us.
Sabrina Amrani se complace en presentar Sound Objects; Unsound Times, la cuarta exposición individual de Babak Golkar en la galería.
La voz —y esa energía visceral y primaria que se manifiesta en el grito— parece haber perdido su lugar hoy por hoy. Gritar en la calle es indecoroso, hacerlo en lo digital es ruido, en la intimidad se traduce en vacío y aislamiento. Y, sin embargo, el grito sigue siendo uno de los gestos más humanos: un desgarro de la garganta que reclama, protesta, libera. ¿Dónde y cómo hacerlo hoy, cuando todo canal parece cooptado, condicionado o, directamente, censurado?
En 2012 Babak Golkar comenzó la serie de sus Scream Pots, esculturas de barro torneado concebidas como contenedores metafóricos del grito. Su creación respondía a un gesto rotundo y primordial del artista: invitar al público no solo a mirar o contemplar, sino a actuar; no solo a reconocer un objeto, sino a completarlo con un sonido contenido en su interior. La obra no existe plenamente sin esa performatividad: sin la respiración que se corta, sin el diafragma que se contrae, sin el rugido íntimo que atraviesa la boca del espectador y se entrega a la vasija. El Scream Pot es, en esencia, un dispositivo de catarsis controlada: permite liberar energía, pero en un marco de silenciamiento. Accede a recibir el grito, pero este queda absorbido, disipado, gobernado por la materialidad del objeto. Nos deja participar, pero siempre bajo las condiciones de un juego reglado.
Esa tensión —entre expresión y contención, entre deseo y límite— es lo que convierte la obra en un espejo del tiempo presente. En ella se cifra la paradoja de nuestro momento histórico: la urgencia de decir, de expresar, de liberarse, frente a la constante problematización de la expresión que imponen los sistemas políticos, mediáticos y tecnológicos. El Scream Pot ofrece un espacio donde la voz se vuelca con toda su potencia, pero a la vez se topa con una estructura que la absorbe y la transforma, igual que los gritos colectivos de hoy parecen perderse en el aire digital y en los muros de la indiferencia global.
En Sound Objects; Unsound Times se presenta un único Scream Pot en el espacio vacío de la galería. Esta decisión, radical y deliberada, convierte la experiencia en una cita ineludible con uno mismo. Al enfrentarse al objeto, cada visitante lo hace en soledad, sin el amparo de la multitud ni el ruido de otros cuerpos alrededor. En esa desnudez, la pieza adquiere un carácter de espejo: el espectador se ve obligado a decidir si se atreve a entrar en la intimidad que le propone el objeto, si acepta depositar en él sus miedos, sus frustraciones y sus deseos de liberación. La soledad que suscita no es un vacío hostil, sino la posibilidad de un encuentro directo y honesto: una grieta de confianza en medio del ruido generalizado.
El Scream Pot es, por tanto, un espacio de paradoja. Una promesa de libertad que se ejerce en un marco de limitación. Un gesto de juego que exige asumir sus reglas. Un recipiente de barro que se vuelve metáfora de un tiempo en el que nuestras emociones son continuamente convocadas y reprimidas, explotadas y desactivadas. Es a la vez un refugio y una trampa, un consuelo y un recordatorio de nuestras impotencias. Y es precisamente esa ambigüedad la que lo hace profundamente vigente.
La aceleración de la crisis global, la saturación de pantallas y estímulos, la impotencia frente a conflictos irresueltos y la inercia de sistemas que nos distraen mientras el mundo se desmorona, hacen que este gesto —tomar aire y gritar en una vasija que lo absorbe— resuene con una intensidad renovada. Nunca antes un objeto tan silencioso había encarnado de manera tan elocuente la disonancia de nuestro tiempo.
La invitación es sencilla: acercarse, tomar el objeto, depositar en él la voz. No hay instrucciones más que el propio impulso. Pero en ese gesto íntimo y mínimo se despliega la potencia de la obra: allí donde lo político, lo social y lo mediático nos han dejado sin espacio para expresarnos, un objeto de barro nos ofrece un resquicio. El grito, aunque amortiguado, existe. La voz, aunque contenida, se pronuncia. Y el acto, aunque regulado, deja una huella en nuestro interior.
Después de tres años investigando teorías y prácticas históricas y contemporáneas de propaganda y el impacto de las imágenes en nuestra vida cotidiana, Babak Golkar analiza el papel de las redes sociales, los mercados de Internet y la consiguiente cultura de la imagen en la que no solo estamos involucrados, sino profundamente inmersos e implicados. En la exposición, el artista juega con la idea de ser constantemente manipulado a través de nuestra percepción limitada, para lo cual la imagen es una herramienta poderosa. Golkar examina una variedad de registros culturales, desde los primeros trabajos de Bertolt Brecht en la década de 1920 hasta el uso de propaganda por parte de Joseph Goebbels, desde la Ley de Prägnanz hasta la influencia de la doctrina de Steve Bannon y el Tea Party en la administración de Trump, mientras se centra en una necesaria desconfianza de la esfera retiniana. The Longer You Can Look Back, The Farther You Can Look Forward, con un punto de vista fresco y lúdico, explora las ideas complejas de la manipulación contemporánea.
La exposición comienza con If You Are Going Through Hell, Keep Going. Churchill (2017–2019), un conjunto de tres impresiones en vinilo, impresas a partir de tres pinturas a gran escala que Golkar ejecutó en base a tres fotografías de una película documental representando a Winston Churchill tirándose por un tobogán al agua, de cabeza y boca arriba.
Pintado en un estilo que recuerda a una bambalina de teatro, Mann Ist Mann (2017-2019) es una pintura al óleo a base de plomo de una fotografía tomada en 1899 de Nikolai II, zar de Rusia, que pretende volar en la parte posterior de su amigo y primo el príncipe Nicolás de Grecia. Mientras los dos hombres poderosos son capturados en la foto en acto juguetón, Golkar utiliza la imagen a nivel subterráneo como un tropo, haciendo referencia a otro dúo poderoso y políticamente lúdico: Vladimir Putin y Vladislav Surkov, dos jugadores principales en el sistema de propaganda moderno, con conexiones al Teatro Épico de Brecht.
La muestra continúa con una instalación de video de cinco canales titulada Rehearsal (2019), una grabación de un ensayo de danza en cinco actos con dos bailarines contemporáneos. Este trabajo es una interpretación de una pieza musical que Bertolt Brecht escribió para una obra teatral temprana, también titulada Mann ist Mann, que presentó en Berlín entre 1924 y 1926. La obra investiga humorísticamente temas de guerra, fungibilidad humana, identidad perdida a través del lavado de cerebro y de propaganda.
En el verano de 1966, el presidente Mao, lidiando con la controversia y las críticas por haber perdido el control y el poder en general, se sumergió (con sus guardaespaldas) en el río Yangtze para mostrarle al mundo que todavía gozaba de buena salud en relación a la persona promedio.
Fue un golpe de propaganda, el primero de su tipo, y una táctica que muchos políticos han repetido desde entonces (Putin capturado en una fotografía haciendo karate en un kimono es un ejemplo). La imagen del chapuzón de Mao se distribuyó en todo el mundo, cortesía de la BBC, que informó sobre el evento desde su estación en China. La imagen de la BBC es la fuente de la pintura de Golkar Drifters (2018). En la exposición, la imagen de la pintura se ha transformado además en un papel de pared a gran escala que cubre una pared entera de la galería.
Centrándose aún más en el impacto de la realidad descontextualizada producida por las imágenes, Golkar presenta Amusement Park, 1924 (2018). Desde lejos, esta pieza es una pinturade aspecto impresionista, casi desvaída, que representa una noria en un parque de atracciones, y el marco se asemeja inocentemente a un marco francés adornado. Sin embargo, en una inspección más cercana, el verdadero tema sale a la luz: los asientos del carrusel están llenos de figuras encapuchadas que pertenecen al Ku Kux Klan, y la cámara también capta algunas brasas que yacen en el suelo. La pintura se basa en una fotografía de 1924 tomada por Clinton Rolfe del parque de atracciones KKK en Colorado. Como complemento de la pintura, el marco artesanal imita el estilo colonial de adornado francés, con una modificación sutil: se agrega una soga en miniatura a cada lado del marco.
Como cierre de la exposición, abordando la propaganda y su relación histórica directa con el psicoanálisis, Golkar presenta Sellers (2017), una instalación compuesta por una pintura a gran escala y una pieza de sonido en bucle. Ambas piezas trazan las conexiones entre la propaganda y el marketing, a través de las obras del propagandista estadounidense y magnate de las relaciones públicas Edward Bernays (sobrino de Sigmund Freud) y el Ministro de Propaganda del Tercer Reich, Joseph Goebbels. El clip de sonido que lo acompaña es de Thea Rasche, una piloto alemán que se convirtió en una celebridad instantánea en la década de 1920 después de volar de Berlín a Nueva York. Contratada por Bernays para anunciar faldas cortas para niñas, Rasche habla en el clip de sonido sobre "la psicología del vestido" y cómo las niñas deben "expresarse" a través de su elección de ropa. De manera similar, el retrato de Goebbels está pintado de forma anamórfica para producir un efecto diferente dependiendo de dónde se vea desde diferentes puntos físicos de la sala.
De forma aleatoria y mientras la exposición esté abierta, la galería se llenará con una densa niebla, desorientando al público y modificando su experiencia y percepción de las obras así como de la exposición en general.
En palabras de Matteo Luchetti “Las obras del artista desarrolladas como parte de la exposición representan una visualización de su desconfianza en la esfera retiniana. Es un viaje que disecciona la circularidad de la historia, en la reaparición del fascismo a través de la simplificación y falsificación de hechos desde la esfera política hacia las masas.”
After three years of researching historical and contemporary theories and practices of propaganda and the impact of images in our daily lives, Babak Golkar analyzes the role of social networks, Internet markets and the consequent image culture in which we are not just involved, but deeply immersed and implicated. In the exhibition, the artist plays with the idea of being constantly manipulated through our limited perception, for which image is a powerful tool. Golkar examines a variety of cultural registers—from Bertolt Brecht’s early works in the 1920s to Joseph Goebbels’ use of propaganda, from the Law of Prägnanz to the influence of Steve Bannon’s doctrine and the Tea Party on Trump’s administration—as he focuses on a necessary distrust of the retinal sphere. The Longer You Can Look Back, The Farther You Can Look Forward, with a fresh and playful point of view, explores the complex ideas of contemporary manipulation.
The exhibition opens with If You Are Going Through Hell, Keep Going. Churchill (2017–2019), a set of three vinyl prints, printed off of three large-scale paintings that Golkar had made based on three stills of a documentary film depicting Winston Churchill going down a waterslide—head first, face up.
Painted in a style reminiscent of a theatre background, Mann Ist Mann (2017–2019) is a large-scale lead-based oil painting of a photograph taken in 1899 of Nikolai II, Tsar of Russia, pretending to fly on the back of his friend and cousin Prince Nicholas of Greece. While the two powerful men are captured in the photo being playful, the image is used by Golkar at a subterranean level as a trope, referencing another powerful and politically playful duo: Vladimir Putin and Vladislav Surkov, two major players in the modern propaganda system, with connections to Brecht’s Epic Theatre.
The show continues with a five-channel video installation titled Rehearsal (2019) is a recording of a five-act rehearsal with two contemporary dancers. This work is an interpretation of a piece of music that Bertolt Brecht wrote for an early play, also titled Mann ist Mann, which he presented in Berlin between 1924 and 1926. The play humorously investigates themes of war, human fungibility, identity lost in brainwashing and propaganda.
In the summer of 1966, Chairman Mao, grappling with controversy and criticism for having lost his control and widespread power, took a dip (with his bodyguards) in the Yangtze River to show the world that he was still in robust health as well as relatable to the average person. It was a propaganda coup—the first of its kind—and a tactic that many politicians have repeated since (Putin captured in a photograph exercising Karate in a kimono is one example). The image of Mao swimming was circulated worldwide, courtesy of the BBC, which reported the event from their station in China. The BBC image is the source for Golkar’s painting Drifters (2018). In the exhibition, the image of the painting has been transformed into a scaled–up collaged and tiled wallpaper that covers an entire wall of the gallery.
Further focusing on the impact of decontextualized reality produced by images, Golkar presents Amusement Park, 1924 (2018). From a distance, this piece is a faint, almost washed-out, Impressionist-looking painting that depicts a merry-go-round in an amusement park, and the frame innocently resembles an ornate French frame. However, on a closer look the true subject comes to light: the seats of the merry-go-round are filled with hooded figures belonging to the KKK, and the camera also catches some embers lying on the ground. The painting is based on a 1924 photograph taken by Clinton Rolfe of a KKK amusement park in Colorado. As a complement to the painting, the ornate handmade frame mimics the French colonial style, with a subtle modification: a miniature noose is added to either side of the frame.
As closure of the exhibition, addressing propaganda and its direct historical relation to psychoanalysis, Golkar presents Sellers (2017), an installation composed of a large-scale painting and a looped sound piece. Both pieces trace the connections between propaganda and marketing, through the works of the American propagandist and public relations mogul Edward Bernays (Sigmund Freud’s nephew) and the Minister of Propaganda of the Third Reich, Joseph Goebbels. The accompanying sound clip is of Thea Rasche, a German pilot who became an instant celebrity in the 1920s after flying from Berlin to New York. Hired by Bernays to advertise short skirts for young girls, Rasche speaks in the sound clip about “the psychology of dress” and how girls should “express” themselves through their choice of clothes. Similarly disorienting, Goebbels’ portrait is
painted anamorphically so as to produce a different effect depending on where it is viewed from different physical points in the space.At random moments during the exhibition, the gallery space will be filled with a very dense fog, further disorienting visitors and changing their experience and perception of the works and the exhibition itself.
In Matteo Lucchetti’s words, “The artist’s works developed as part of the exhibition represent a visualization of his distrust of the retinal sphere. It is a journey that dissects the circularity of history, in the reappearance of fascism via the simplification and forgery of facts from the political sphere to the masses.”
Digital communication is contagious insofar as it occurs on an emotive or affective register, without mediation. . . Digital “content,” even if it holds very little significance, spreads like an epidemic, a pandemic racing through the Net. It is unburdened by the weight of meaning.
Byung-Chul Han, In the Swarm, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2017.
Our daily experience of the world is more and more deriving from images, often juxtaposed with label-like portions of texts to create memes that populate the live feed of our digital lives. We seem to bask in a river of content activated by the lazy scroll of our fingers, which only stops when something catches our attention, and we allow that decontextualized piece of information to reach our synapses and play a role in the formation of what we consider real. Reality—or what we perceive it to be —is, therefore, a product of constant negotiation with the mediascape with which we empathize. We act as individuals, that are certain of their piece of truth and unable to seek interaction with that which sits outside of it.
All the Blind Men is the title chosen by artist Babak Golkar to frame his ongoing research into the role and responsibility of images in the formation of a political climate. It can read as a reference to the mass—or rather the “swarm”[1] —of people who blindly wander in the mediascape grabbing at bits and pieces of truth while failing to understand the bigger picture. In the time of fake news and Cambridge Analytica, the information we gather visually tend to be fabricated by algorithms, allowing images to serve political agendas and to manufacture consent through the manipulation of our emotions. Much like the history of art is entangled with that of propaganda, the role of the artist is intertwined with the power structures that filter what is made visible.
One reoccurring protagonist of Golkar’s recent production is the elephant, as the title of the exhibition The Elephant (An Intermission), at Sabrina Amrani Gallery in Madrid, reveals. The phrasing of the title alludes to Bertolt Brecht’s early play Man Equals Man—addressed by the artist in earlier works—here reappearing with reference to its intermission, titled The Elephant Calf. In Brecht’s writings, the elephant is probably a reference to Kipling’s bias imagery around the British Empire and its jingoistic control of the Indian territories and workforce. Brecht uses, in the intermission, the animal as a metaphor of the ultimate manipulation where a man is convinced to buy a fake elephant after being brainwashed by colonial soldiers. Similarly, Golkar introduces, with such title, an investigation around the dismantling and reassembling of reality in the mediascape, reminiscing the propaganda that the German author was addressing in the late 20s, with the Nazi socialist party on the rise.
The centerpiece of The Elephant (An Intermission) is a suite of thirty-one emotionless black-and-white paintings titled Deaf Feet (December 1–31, 2017).
The paintings, to be understood as daily artistic exercises, depict an upside-down elephant, repeated thirty-one times. Deaf Feet refers to the displacement of the elephant’s feet, metaphorically putting the animal in a disadvantaged position, rendering it unable to hear (as elephants rely on sound waves that travel through the ground rather than the air, allowing it to detect communication from miles away). The work draws on the well-known Rumi parable about a group of sightless men who experience an elephant for the first time, each touching a different part of the animal and each perceiving something unique—a snake, a fan, a tree trunk, and a rope, among other things. Each man regards the others’ partial “view” as dishonest, and the ensuing fight prevents them from knowing the elephant as a whole. Not only Golkar reflects on this blindness as a metaphor for the shortsightedness of our gazes today, but he also projects it into the daily gesture of painting the same upside-down pachyderm for each day of December 2017. Furthermore this prismatic refraction of the animal into thirty-one canvases—lying on the floor against the wall—touches upon the fragmentation of our points of view on reality, and the frailty of the single subjectivity against the entirety of truth in its complexity.
One year into Trump’s administration, with its rooting in Steve Bannon’s doctrine, Golkar marks the anniversary by reframing the Rumi parable through the Law of Prägnanz, a fundamental principle of Gestalt Psychology. Namely, by focusing on the forms without getting lost in the contents, the artist turned his canvases bottom up; therefore defying the traps we can fall into when perceiving shapes pre-registered in our brains. Golkar’s assembly of elephants reverberates with the history of the manipulation of perception, suggesting that we are all complacently blind and deaf to the signals of danger that echo from a not-so-distant past.
In addition to Deaf Feet, Golkar’s contributions to the exhibition include Palimpsest, a second series of black-and-white paintings, and a porcelain sculpture of an elephant, reminiscent of a piggy bank. Both works are revolving, in different ways, around the same topics and investigation. The artist’s works developed as part of the exhibition represent a visualization of his distrust of the retinal sphere. It is a journey that dissects the circularity of history, in the reappearance of fascism via the simplification and forgery of facts from the political sphere to the masses.
[1] Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in his influential book In the Swarm. Digital Prospects, introduces the idea of the “‘swarm”’ to characterize the behavior of the masses in the digital era
Sabrina Amrani se complace en presentar “The Elephant (an intermission)”, la segunda exposición individual de Babak Golkar en la galería, formando parte de Apertura Madrid Gallery Weekend.
Nuestra experiencia diaria del mundo se deriva cada vez más de imágenes, a menudo yuxtapuestas con porciones de texto en forma de etiqueta para crear memes que pueblan la transmisión en vivo de nuestras vidas digitales. Parece que nos deleitamos en un río de contenido activado por el desplazamiento lento de nuestros dedos, que solo se detiene cuando algo llama nuestra atención, y permitimos que esa información
descontextualizada llegue a nuestras sinapsis y juegue un papel en la formación de lo que consideramos real. La realidad —o lo que percibimos que es— es por lo tanto, un producto de negociación constante con el paisaje de medios con el que empatizamos. Actuamos como individuos, que están seguros de su verdad y no pueden buscar la interacción con lo que se encuentra fuera de ella.
“The Elephant (an intermission)” es una exposición individual de Babak Golkar que es un capítulo de “All the Blind Men”, el título elegido por el artista Babak Golkar para enmarcar su investigación continua de tres años sobre el papel y la responsabilidad de las imágenes en la formación de un clima político. “All the Blind Men” (Todos los Hombre Ciegos) se puede leer como una referencia a la masa, o más bien al "enjambre", de personas que deambulan ciegamente en el paisaje de los medios de comunicación agarrando fragmentos de verdad mientras no entienden el panorama general. En la era de las noticias falsas y Cambridge Analytica, la información que recopilamos visualmente tiende a ser fabricada por algoritmos, lo que permite que las imágenes sirvan a agendas políticas y generen consentimiento a través de la manipulación de nuestras emociones. Al igual que la historia del arte se enreda con la de la propaganda, el papel del artista se entrelaza con las estructuras de poder que filtran lo que se hace visible.
Un protagonista recurrente de la reciente producción de Golkar es el elefante, como revela el título de la exposición. La redacción del título alude a la primera obra de Bertolt Brecht “Mann ist Mann” —abordada por el artista en otras obras de la serie “All the Blind Men”— aquí reapareciendo con referencia a su intermedio, titulado “The Elephant Calf”. En los escritos de Brecht, el elefante es probablemente una referencia a las imágenes sesgadas de Kipling en torno al Imperio Británico y su control jingoístico de los territorios
y la fuerza laboral de la India. Brecht utiliza, en el intermedio, el animal como unametáfora de la manipulación final donde un hombre está convencido de comprar un elefante falso después de que los soldados coloniales le hayan lavado el cerebro. Del mismo modo, Golkar presenta, con dicho título, una investigación sobre el
desmantelamiento y el remontaje de la realidad en el paisaje de medios, recordando la propaganda que el autor alemán estaba abordando a finales de los años 20, con el partido socialista nazi en surgiendo.
La pieza central de “The Elephant (An Intermission)” es un conjunto de treinta y una pinturas en blanco y negro tituladas “Deaf Feet - December 1–31”, 2017. Las pinturas, que deben entenderse como ejercicios artísticos diarios, representan un elefante del revés, repetido treinta y una veces, ejecutada cada una cada día de diciembre de 2017. “Deaf Feet” (Pies Sordos) se refiere al desplazamiento de las patas del elefante,
colocando metafóricamente al animal en una posición desfavorecida, haciéndolo incapaz de escuchar (ya que los elefantes confían en ondas de sonido que viajar a través del suelo en lugar del aire, lo que les permite detectar la comunicación desde millas de distancia).
El trabajo se basa en la conocida parábola de Rumi sobre un grupo de hombres ciegos que experimentan un elefante por primera vez, cada uno tocando una parte diferente del animal y cada uno percibe algo único: una serpiente, un abanico, el tronco de un árbol y una soga, entre otras cosas. Cada hombre considera la "visión" parcial de los demás como deshonesta, y la disputa generada entre ellos les impide comprehender al elefante como un todo. Golkar no solo reflexiona sobre esta ceguera como una metáfora de la miopía de nuestras miradas de hoy, sino que también la proyecta en el gesto diario de pintar el mismo paquidermo al revés cada uno de los días de diciembre de 2017. Además, esta refracción prismática del animal en 31 lienzos aborda la fragmentación de nuestros puntos de vista sobre la realidad y la fragilidad de la subjetividad única contra la
totalidad de la verdad en su complejidad.
Además de las obras “Deaf Feet”, Golkar contribuye a la exposición con una escultura de porcelana de un elefante — con una serpiente como trompeta, dos abanicos como orejas, cuatro troncos de árboles como patas y una cuerda como cola— en un guiño a la parábola de Rumi de nuevo.
Un año después de la administración de Trump, con su enraizamiento en la doctrina de Steve Bannon, Golkar marca el aniversario al reformular la parábola de Rumi a través de la Ley de Prägnanz, un principio fundamental de la Psicología Gestalt. Es decir, al enfocarse en las formas sin perderse en los contenidos, el artista volteó sus lienzos, desafiando las trampas en las que podemos caer al percibir formas pre-registradas en nuestros cerebros. El ensamblaje de Golkar de un elefante en su escultura de porcelana reverbera con la historia de la manipulación de la percepción, lo que sugiere que todos estamos complacientemente ciegos y sordos a las señales de peligro que resuenan en un pasado no muy lejano.
Las obras del artista desarrolladas como parte de la exposición representan una visualización de su desconfianza en la esfera retiniana. Es un viaje que disecciona la circularidad de la historia, en la reaparición del fascismo a través de la simplificación y falsificación de hechos desde la esfera política hacia las masas.
Sabrina Amrani is pleased to present In No Particular Hurry, the first solo exhibition in Spain by Canadian artist Babak Golkar. The exhibition features Golkar’s latest body of work - composed of taxidermy, ceramics, 3D printed ABS or hydrostone among other materials -, a series of new sculptural assemblages titled Time Capsules (2016-2116).
In no particular Hurry questions the notions of value creation and the role of the artist in
governing these systems. Through the artist’s use of time as a key connecting material, all works unpack dominant geo-political issues that have emerged through his close engagement with each object and their associated histories. “For the project I bracketed roughly 200 years in researching materials and their processes; experiences and conditions from the last hundred years and how they have or will continue to affect us” describes Golkar.
Varying in scale and form, each work in Time Capsules contains a concealed artwork unknown to anyone but the artist. It is ill-advised to unveil their interiors until the suggested time has passed, inevitably outliving the artist and those who initially acquire the work. If any capsule opens prior to the passing of one hundred years, the artworks become void and their economic value drops to zero by way of a written agreement between Golkar and the collector. It is only at this threshold that the objects fully manifest themselves, becoming anew in 2116.
Golkar describes In No Particular Hurry as a way to further consider the practice of photography and its limitations. He states: “It’s a form of preserving time - denoting a certain subject but also what it is not there. There is a frame that plays with both a concealment and exposure. I am often unresolved with photography and perhaps the capsules make for a more complicated simultaneity of pseudo-presence and tokens of
absence. The difference here lies in the potency of what is entrapped within the capsules. In In No Particular Hurry art transpires in the space between the container and the contained.”
Sabrina Amrani se complace en presentar In No Particular Hurry, la primera exposición individual en España del artista canadiense Babak Golkar. La muestra exhibe su último trabajo, que consiste en obras de taxidermia, cerámica, fibra de vidrio e impresión 3D entre otros materiales. Una serie recopilatoria de nuevas esculturas llamada Time Capsules (2016-2116).
In no particular hurry se interroga acerca de los conceptos de creación de valor, y del papel del artista en controlar este sistema. A través del uso por parte del artista del tiempo como clave para conectar los elementos, todas las obras vacían de contenido cuestiones de la geopolítica dominante que surgen de su compromiso íntimo con cada objeto y sus relatos relacionados. "Para este proyecto abarqué aproximadamente 200 años de investigación de materiales y sus procesos, experiencias y condiciones de los
últimos 100 años, y cómo nos afectan o continuarán afectandonos", afirma Golkar.
Diversas en su tamaño y forma, cada obra de In No Particular Hurry contiene en su interior una obra de arte oculta y desconocida para todos excepto para el artista. Sería desacertado revelar el contenido hasta que el momento aconsejado llegue, que inevitablemente sobrevivirá al artista y a aquellos que adquieran la obra inicialmente. Si alguna de las capsulas se abriera antes de 100 años, las obras se tornarían vacías y su valoración económica se desplomaría a cero por medio de un contrato firmado entre Golkar y el coleccionista. Es sólo por medio de este acuerdo inicial por el que los objetos se mostrarán completamente, convirtiéndose en algo distinto en 2116.
Golkar describe In No Particular Hurry como una forma de considerar más a fondo la práctica fotográfica y sus limitaciones. Afirma: "Se trata de una manera de preservar el tiempo señalando un sujeto incuestionable, pero también lo que no está presente. Hayuna estructura que actúa tanto con lo escondido como con lo expuesto. A menudo no encuentro la solución con la fotografía y quizá las cápsulas revelen una complicada simultaneidad de pseudo-presencia y señales de ausencia. La diferencia radica en la potencialidad de lo que está atrapado dentro de las cápsulas. En In No Particular Hurry el arte sucede en el espacio entre contenedor y contenido."
Babak Golkar’s “Grounds for Standing and Understanding” explores representations of space by creating a sculptural interface between bodies and architecture that generates contemporary forms by opening a new dimension on a historical mode. This conceptual intervention produces a critique of the ideology underpinning architecture and the design of public space, questioning their use and effects while posing imaginative problems that encourage the bodily engagement of the viewer.
Golkar’s recent work develops critical acuity by establishing a coherent spatial vocabulary as it surveys the postmodern juncture of concepts, acts, subjects and objects which are spatially interrelated. Exploring spaces traditionally supposed to be sacred, zones excluded from the everyday, Golkar examines their philosophical integrity, illuminating contradictions in the gulf between thought and activity. But this exclusion from the everyday is revealed as a metaphysical fantasy that a particular space could be exceptional; that something escapes the ubiquity of terrain. Golkar reveals these spaces as produced in a sense similar to that established in Henri Lefebvre’s theory: the space of his work is not a neutral, accidental container of objects and events, but is itself the product of activity, and the expression of otherwise unconscious interactions (The Production of Space). In what follows I will review the way Golkar’s practice moves from literal space to symbolic spaces; from content to ideological frame.
Golkar’s earlier Parergon series functions as a fine introduction to the expanded spatiality of his practice. These parerga, or frames, disrupt the expected function of literal framing: where usually a frame surrounds an artwork, here the work is the frame, disrupting the familiar opposition of inside/outside. The extrusion of an architectural silhouette through space generates an interrupted frame which secretes the recognizable referent, the exterior shape of a mosque, in a dimension of the frame that is usually closed-off: the cross-section. The literal lack of closure of the frame leaves just enough information to disclose the building, a holy site hidden in plain view.
Each Parergon forces consciousness of the fact that the architecture depicted literally frames behaviours in situ; this is doubly true of the symbolic space of mosques, buildings repeatedly transformed by historical overdetermination and religious claims. The Dome of the Rock, for example, a historically contested symbolic site, is spatially significant to both Jews and Muslims, itself framing a foundational stone deemed holy by both traditions.
According to Jacques Derrida’s definition, “a parergon is against, beside, and above and beyond the ergon, the work accomplished [...]. But it is not incidental; it is connected to and cooperates in its operation from the outside” (“The Parergon” 20). But Golkar’s innovation of the frame flattens the expected spatial dichotomy of inside/outside: these works literalize the “internal structural link by which [parerga] are inseparable from a lack within the ergon,” (“The Parergon” 24). The ergon, the work itself, is invisible until the viewer looks “awry” (to paraphrase Slavoj Zizek,) and adopts the required framing of her own perspective.
Golkar’s pieces, which leave the space within the frame empty and open, appear to have allowed their content to escape, disclosing “a lack within the ergon.” A frontal view of Golkar’s Parergon appears to offer only an abstract partial frame, its cross-sectional relief collapsed. As Derrida notes, Greek philosophical tradition dictates that parergon “is that which should not become, by distinguishing itself, the principal subject”; “parerga should not be allowed to take precedence over the essential” (“Parergon” 20). But Golkar deftly refutes this prohibition, inverting and canceling the presumed difference between a primary object of attention and its supplement by foregrounding a neglected spatial dimension of the frame.
As Golkar’s work demands vertiginous perspectival shifts of the viewer, requiring movement through gallery space and conceptual space alike that animate the visual object and generate new images, it brings the often invisible influence of space on social practice to the fore. Engaging the signifiers of both Suprematism and Islam in “From God to Malevich...”, Golkar dictates the viewer’s position and motion to induce an imagined space through the relatively simple effect of a lenticular illusion, an image situated behind a lens so that it appears to move as the viewer changes position. In order to see what the work does, a viewer must obey its full title: “From God to Malevich: 80 degree View, Left to Right, Then Reversed, To Be Viewed at an Arm’s- Length.” From one perspective, the viewer is hailed by the work, interpellated as a moving imaging-platform, a seer in the specific space of the gallery. In treating the viewer as an object encountering another object, a spatialized cubic version of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, the work almost elides subjectivity, even while disclosing the appearance of a moving image that relies on the participation of the individual. But the ambiguous cube establishes a simultaneous association with the Kaaba of Mecca, the black cubic building toward which Muslims pray. Appearing to turn before him in response to his own steps, the cube also interpellates the viewer as a Muslim pilgrim following the traditional Hajj, which requires every Muslim to circumambulate the building at least once in his life. Here a contested, ambiguous space is produced which is both profane and sacred; which recalls both the Suprematist response to Catholic icons in Black Square, and the locus of sacred Muslim tradition in the Kaaba.
Golkar’s myriad spatial interventions culminate in the series Grounds for Standing and Understanding. A semantic doubling hints at the manifold nature of the project: the “Grounds” are both a conceptual basis for communication and a literal support on which people stand.
The pieces that make up Grounds for Standing and Understanding engage with the traditional craft of Persian carpets by making them the pattern for a speculative fantasy architecture. Related to the earlier Parergon, the extrusion this time is through not horizontal, but vertical space. By selecting patterns in the woven two-dimensional surface and translating them upward as tower structures, the artist generates objects that traverse the three dimensional space above the plane. These stacked forms that emulate the distinctive shapes of traditional weaving grow out of shapes that alwaysalready implied geographic and architectural patterns: traditional Persian carpets function as particular representations of space, including gardens, waterways, walls and paths.
Golkar’s series forms an oblique response to the architectural mega-projects of the past decade: as they stretch upward his forms call to mind the phenomenon of ever-taller skyscrapers rising globally with increased frequency, and concentrated recently in the Middle East. Vertical projections from the carpets form a wholly new architectural idiom which also bears an uncanny traditional appearance, due to its origin in the millennia-old Persian tradition of weaving. The traditional forms on the carefully chosen carpet often give rise to areas that might function as public space; but these are dominated by towering skyscrapers, forms that soar with geometrical precision and remain aloof from the lower structures of the carpet’s surface. It is difficult not to see a reference in these competing towers to a real world monument to the vertical dimension such as the recently completed Burj Khalifa in Dubai (about which more below). Why do we build up with such fevered obsession? If it is an attempt to escape the pull of gravity, or the profanity of the Earth, then the question is raised— escape into what? More to the point: for whom do we build ever higher?
In the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, the “Autre” or “big Other” is the presumed god-like perspective that sees all from above and anchors meaning. Lacan’s claim that there is no big Other does not mean that it does not function: in fact, now that “god is dead” the big Other has more power— we observe ourselves with imagined acuity from the perspective of an empty place. The postmodern big Other is a force dwelling in an imaginary Earth orbit, always above, beyond the horizontality of mortals, compensating for their limited vision: seeing an ordered whole where mortals perceive contingent chaos.
It is this perspective for which feats such as Dubai’s Burj Khalifa are engineered. At 2,717 feet, architect Adrian Smith’s mammoth tower is taller than both World Trade Center towers stacked; from its pinnacle the curvature of the Earth is clearly visible. When seen from above, its three-lobed footprint resembles the Hymenocallis, a regional desert flower. But for whom is this shape developed: who will ever see this view? So far only those who have viewed a satellite image of the structure. In a similar bid for the attention of the big Other, Abu Dhabi's Sheikh Hamad Bin Hamdan Al Nahyan carved “HAMAD” into the restricted desert island he owns; his name is legible only at altitude. Both of these cases contain a feature that is invisible in the horizontal experience of terrain, but which leaps into view when seen from the perspective of the orbital big Other. This perspective has now been visualized by Google Earth, a digital atlas, itself a carpet of stitched-together satellite photographs. The conspicuous characteristic of this software is a scale fluidity that allows a flying eye to freely zoom in and out, from street view to continental and planetary comprehension: to both examine detail and survey vast area. The apparent resolution into recognizable content from the orbital perspective is both an affirmation of the imaginary power of the other’s surveillance, and an opportunity to dethrone the big Other, to assume the perspective which confers omniscience. Moving among Golkar’s architectural miniatures, which elide any hint at their precise scale relative to the human body, the viewer might feel traces of the overhead flight offered by Google Earth, soaring over the rooftops of fantasy skyscrapers, peering down at a distant surface.
The forms that rise like three dimensional expressions of the carpet are both complemented and complicated by scaled-up segments of his imaginary building, generating a body-space relationship closer to street-view on the scale continuum. Without their incorporation in a building, these architectural elements pulled from their context recall Robert Morris’s “Untitled (three L beams)” (1965). Golkar’s elements pose spatial problems in terms of function and scale: function, in that they appear to have a purpose, but no ready use; scale, in that the sharp-eyed viewer will recognize these architectural elements from the miniature building complexes that rise out of the nearby Persian carpets. As they partially enclose and divide space from space in complex patterns, these building fragments also resonate with Richard Serra’s sculptural interventions in public space, with their bewildering effect on the locomotion of those who travel through the space.
Here the collision between miniature-scale towers that one can walk among while looking down at their details, and bodily-scaled portions of those models creates a feeling of vertigo by enhancing the implied magnitude of the models and creating the sensation that the viewer has been shrunk to fit into the carpet-generated forms. These contradictory feelings show the flaw in our perceptual systems that can so easily be misled by the imagination: human bodies appear to us as a universal standard of scale, but the scale-fluidity of Golkar’s work produces a vertigo of relative sizes. Bodies feel bigger or smaller relative to the geometric environment that embraces them. This generates a dynamic resizing of the viewer in response to what is actually the scale fluctuation of the environment. It is pertinent to ask, ‘what is the zero-level of scale? Are the large pieces magnified or actual size? Do the “miniatures” stand in for something massive, or are they actual size?’ By one reading, Golkar’s poetics of scale produces a spatial derangement which sends one back to the most recent reference points: in this case the nation, the “imagined community” that has resurged since its apparent attenuation with the rise of globalization [Anderson; Derksen; Smith]. By another reading, this derangement, this scale-vertigo, could be read as mimetic of a postmodern characteristic: a hyper-awareness of the spatial dimension of reality that is revealed in the relations of globalization and the technology of the space age.
Resisting stasis by compelling the viewer through gallery space, the work of Golkar’s work inheres in his dialectical engagement with perspective itself. The combination, even oscillation, between a first-person horizontal view and an (imagined) overhead view forces the subject to see a broken continuity as itself an object; to see distortions of the large at small scale and the small at large scale; to see what is normally elided by our fixed vantage points, both literal and ideological.
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