Babi Badalov

Quarantine made me feel I am the only man on the earth who is witnessing the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic looks for me like a story known only from books about the biggest global catastrophes. Now all of us have to stay the whole day at home which makes us uncertain of our life after a disaster. I'm afraid that the state can use our fear of the next sudden global crisis to change the basic standards of our everyday existence. I feel already I am not the same person when I'm walking through the empty street, going to the market with a declaration in my pocket to have the right to buy a product for surviving in my studio. But, I feel I got used to a scary uncertain future!! Today it's 22nd day I'm quarantined in my studio.

Bio

Babi Badalov (Lerik, Azerbaijan, 1959) lives and works in Paris. Badalov is a visual artist and a poet who expresses his ideas through visual poetry, art objects, installations and live performances. He also experiments with words and writes obscure poetry, mixing languages and images of different cultures. Language is the essential material of his work. He is interested in its limits and its ability to isolate the individual from the rest of the society. Badalov uses language to contemplate the current geo-political situation, relating it to his personal experiences of migration through countries of the former Soviet Union, the United States, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. His drawings, collages and ornamental poetry manifest the cultural, historical and ideological overlapping of our globalized world. His visual poetry often takes the form of a diary, created daily through a combination of his own linguistic research and manipulated pictorial material, mainly with political content.

Badalov’s work has been shown at solo exhibitions at the Tensta Konsthall (Stockholm, Sweden), the MUSAC (León, Spain), the Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France), the Kunstraum München (Munich, Germany), as well as group exhibitions at the MOCAK (Krakow, Poland), the Kunstmuseum (Bern, Switzerland), the New Museum (New York, United States), the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium), or international events as the 1^st Thessaloniki Biennale (Greece, 2007), the Manifesta 8 (Murcia, Spain, 2011), the 15^th Jakarta Biennale (Indonesia, 2013), the 6^th Moscow Biennale (Russia, 2015) and the 11^th Gwangju Biennale (Republic of Korea, 2016), amongst other venues and events.