The MCBA is organizing the first monographic exhibition in Switzerland on the work of Babi Badalov. The artist's visual poetry is both writing and drawing and explores the political and poetic possibilities of language.
Words form the basis of Babi Badalov's work, which unfolds like a huge collage in which the languages and alphabets that form the basis of his complex identity are intermingled. Born in Azerbaijan in 1959, the artist grew up at the intersection of Azerbaijani, Persian and Soviet culture. After a series of exile sojourns, during which he explored the St. Petersburg underground of the 1980s, the art scenes of San Francisco and New York in the early 1990s and Great Britain in the early 2000s, he now lives in Paris and yet still has the feeling that he is forever a stranger.
Babi Badalov. Xenopoetri: Antipoem, 2021 © Babi Badalov
By breaking down language into its most concrete elements - letters, syllables - the artist invents a form of expression that is both a place of refuge and a battlefield. As the title of the exhibition shows, he mostly proceeds according to the principle of free phonetic association, which is reminiscent of certain Dadaist strategies. The anarchism of Mikhail Bakunin and the nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche, which were once central to the conception of Dada, continue to be important points of reference for Badalov. His work is based on the experience of oppression, rejection and being an outsider and yet seeks to create a horizontal utopia in which everyone is called upon to free themselves from systems of domination.
The fluidity expressed in the media he uses, whether in the form of the fabrics he paints on or the everyday objects he uses for monumental collages, testifies to a deeply curious, sensitive but also critical view of his time.
February 2 to April 28, 2024
