Nairy Baghramian: Déformation Professionnelle

Nairy Baghramian: Déformation Professionnelle
08.09.2017 - 05.02.2018

Over the past two decades, Nairy Baghramian (Germany, b. Iran, 1971) has created sculptures, photographic works, and drawings that explore relationships between architecture, everyday objects, and the human body. Her works mark boundaries, transitions, and gaps in the museum, prompting us to consider form and meaning in the context of interior and exterior spaces. Drawing on a multiplicity of references—including dance, theater, design, and fashion—and producing unlikely juxtapositions in material and scale, Baghramian questions and challenges the definition of sculpture.

Déformation Professionnelle offers a new approach to the artist survey, an exhibition format that follows the development of an artist’s career over a period of time. Here, Baghramian has replaced the original invitation to do a retrospective and presents entirely new sculptures that reflect upon and alter her previous bodies of work from 1999 to 2016. Some pieces incorporate rejected ideas or materials, while others explore variations in form. Baghramian is, as she says, “surveying the survey,” pushing the sculptor’s task into new territory with her ever-evolving practice.

The exhibition takes its name from a French phrase often translated as “professional distortion” or “job conditioning,” referring to ways that a person’s worldview can be altered by their chosen vocation. The artist uses the exhibition as an opportunity to take apart her own profession and lay bare the sculptor’s method. In fact, the word “deformation” can also be applied to form, pointing to basic actions such as shaping, modeling, or casting. Through her playful yet critical take on the artist survey, Baghramian unpacks and interrogates the conceptual, physical, and social aspects of sculpture-making today.

At the Walker, Nairy Baghramian: Déformation Professionnelle was organized by curators Vincenzo de Bellis with Victoria Sung; at S.M.A.K., the exhibition was organized by curator Martin Germann.