OPENING
FRIDAY 07.12.12 AT 7PM

EXHIBITION
08.12.12 – 13.01.13

 

Over the last four years Babak Ghazi discarded his art production to focus on the development of Lifework, a personal synthesis of art and life. Rejecting the completeness of an artwork, Lifework is communicated as an open-ended library or resource, in which found and fabricated material is presented collage-like in box files and crates. For this exhibition, Babak Ghazi is presenting only the crates.

As Ghazi writes: “Each of us turns our instincts into ways of living, philosophies, art. We attempt coherence. But in the process we get rid of the non-sense, the stuff that doesn’t fit into our newly stable identity. Lifework is my idea and identity, but there is a remainder – the stuff that did not make it into my ordered archive, collected here in the crates. It is the stuff that I can neither make sense of nor let go of. It is my excess.”

We are presented with an archive, a diary and a confession but also a fiction, contrived as object and performance. Magazines, personal possessions, test prints and tracings: much of the material evidences the construction of an artistic persona and the way in which artifice, stylization and self-invention can constitute moments of revelation. The artist asks you to engage with it as much or as little as you like. Please Touch.

Babak Ghazi (born 1976, lives in London) graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2001. He organizes the Not Yet Night events series and self-publishes Not-Yet magazine. In 2012 he presented Lifework at Raven Row gallery, London.