Nairy Baghramian @ S.M.A.K | Gent | Belgium

Nairy Baghramian | Déformation Professionelle

curator, Martin Germann
duration  26.11. 2016 - 19.02.2017
S.M.A.K | Gent | Belgium

Baghramian (b.1971 in Isfahan, Iran; lives and works in Berlin) explores and reflects on the formal languages of both modernism and post-minimalism. The sculptor has become internationally known for making exhibitions by means of sculpture and site-responsive installations that play on the human body and its gestures, which are both revealing and dissembling. Her work marks boundaries, transitions and gaps in the museum and urban space, whereby she focuses on the relationship between body and building and refers to fashion and design, theatre and dance.
Using material such as curved steel sheets and soft rubber, geometric frameworks and hybrid objects, mirrors, plastics, waxes and fabrics, as well as cast and combined materials, Baghramian scrutinizes the paradigms of the sculptural. In doing so, she challenges the spaces where she exhibits, within the area of spatial tension that is inseparably linked to her artistic production.
Déformation Professionnelle comprises a series of new sculptures and installations that build on the key works in Baghramian’s oeuvre over the last fifteen years. For this purpose she has reinterpreted not only the works themselves, but also the tools and other work materials that she used in making the artworks. In this exhibition, Baghramian in this sense criticises, emphasises and stretches the concept of the ‘retrospective’. Through her playful take on the retrospective view, she unpacks and interrogates the conceptual, economic, physical and social aspects of sculpture.
Taking its title from a French phrase that indicates an adjustment to one’s worldview that results from being overly specialized or an expert, Déformation Professionnelle also speaks of analysing one’s profession or métier: in this case the artist’s method.

Nairy Baghramian | Déformation Professionnelle is co-organized by S.M.A.K., Ghent, Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Salzburg, and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Catalogue
The exhibition will be accompanied by the publication of the first comprehensive monograph on the artist’s work, published by S.M.A.K. (Ghent), Museum der Moderne Salzburg (Salzburg) and Walker Art Center (Minneapolis). The publication will be released in the course of the exhibition tour.
Exhibition Tour
The exhibition will travel to Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, in March 2017, and to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in October 2017.

S.M.A. K.
Museum of Contemporary Art
Jan Hoetplein 1,
9000 Gent | Belgium