Panel Discussion: Of Labour, Of Dirt
This panel discussion revolves around Babak Golkar’s exhibition Of Labour, Of Dirt at Sazmanab-Ab/Anbar, with Hamid Severi, Farzan Sojoodi, and Elham Puriyamehr.
Of Labour, Of Dirt extends Babak Golkar’s underlying inquiry into individual compromise and negotiation when confronted with suppression and emotional distress under contemporary human conditions. The exhibition playfully engages these questions while subtly pointing to the more sombre realities of living in a time in which systemic conditions often overpower basic human conditions. Systems that were once consciously man-made now exist in fixed and self-sustaining modes. Rather than offering answers, Of Labour, Of Dirt proposes a glimpse into the dialectical conditions of these muted relations.
The exhibition features Golkar’s use of clay to access ideas of labour and production as modes that can be studied and adapted in response to imbalances in contemporary life. The labour process results in fifty wheel-thrown terracotta scream pots and three large-scale terracotta scream-vessels, designed to mute or amplify a simple scream. Engaging with the scream pots offers visitors a momentary experience of the fine line between relief and contestation embedded in the act of screaming. Through subtle shifts in stance and interaction, the audience encounters the ambiguous position of being both object and subject within these suspended conditions.
Of Labour, Of Dirt is the final cycle in a series of three exhibitions examining dynamics of failure, acknowledging systemic conditions, and questioning dissatisfaction with the paradoxes of labour. The first cycle, Dialectic of Failure, was exhibited at the West Vancouver Museum in 2013 and later recontextualised for TIME TO LET GO…, a public installation commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery. Sazmanab-Ab/Anbar’s presentation of Of Labour, Of Dirt marks Babak Golkar’s first solo exhibition in Iran and the first presentation of his work in Tehran.
Babak Golkar was born in Berkeley in 1977 and spent most of his formative years in Tehran until migrating to Vancouver in 1996. He obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Arts from Emily Carr Institute in 2003 and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia in 2006. His practice investigates diverse subjects through a conceptual vocabulary grounded in spatial analysis and contemporary systemic conditions that overpower human experience. By merging and examining previously discrete systems and forms, and asserting both underlying unity and antagonistic tensions, Golkar engages a critical inquiry across cultural and socio-economic registers. His solo exhibition Dialectic of Failure at the West Vancouver Museum examined the fragile processes of compromise and negotiation between dichotomies such as historicism and modernity, art and craft, and modern reasoning and traditional mysticism.
Venue: Sazmanab-Ab/Anbar (Khaghani St.)
Date: Thursday, 30 October 2014, 18:00–20:00
