Inside Nairy Baghramian’s sculptural playground
The artist fled Iran for Berlin to find freedom. She explains why her work is the celebration of ‘a life unbound’
by Kristina Foster. Photography by Daniel Feistenauer
It was a modest, screen-like structure erected in the car park of Skulptur Projekte Münster in western Germany in 2007 that made Nairy Baghramian’s name. Resembling scaffolding, it could easily have gone unnoticed. Those who did stop to look encountered a minimalist intervention that served to obscure the view and divide the car park into two spaces, making a subtle statement about boundaries and segregation.
Her Brussels show, titled nameless, also explores transience. It will feature recent drawings and maquettes that offer insight into what Wiels director Dirk Snauwaert describes as her “doodling, automatic practice”, which he connects to the surrealist tradition of automatic drawing. Baghramian has also collected old neon signs that will be melted down and reblown by artisans into curvaceous abstract forms, emptied of their former meaning as advertising signs.
But, as ever, the show carries a poignant undertone. It’s “about how sculpture has the potential in difficult times to recreate and reshape itself,” she says. “Something positive always involves a collapse and a re-creation, to create something that’s always built on each other, pushing things out, building again, assembling things again.”
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