Nairy Baghramian: Déformation Professionnelle

S.M.A.K. is pleased to present Déformation Professionnelle (Professional Deformation), an exhibition of new work by Nairy Baghramian. The artist has become internationally known for her contextual approach to exhibition-making via sculpture and photography in a site-responsive practice that plays off the body, its gestures and its supportive functions. Déformation Professionnelle is a new production which builds on 18 ensembles in Baghramian’s oeuvre from 1999 to 2016. In this exhibition the artist is, in her own words, “surveying the survey.”

Baghramian evocatively employed her oeuvre so far, from existing works through discarded ideas to miscellaneous material. Large-scale works such as Class Reunion (2008), Retainer (2012) and French Curve (2014) serve as a conceptual framework for the renegotiations presented here with titles such as Stay Downers, Headgear and Flat Spine. Within the museum architecture’s designated and peripheral spaces, the works show a complex engagement with form, language and meaning in their shifts from one series into the other.

Taking its title from a French phrase that means an adjustment to one’s worldview that results from being overly specialized, Déformation Professionnelle also speaks of analysing one’s profession or métier: in this case the artist’s method. She radically liberates the mythology of the oeuvre by reducing it to a supporting structure around which, as it were, she built this exhibition. Déformation Professionnelle was literally conceived in the setting of two eclipsed spaces: the fictive blueprints of completed artworks, and the architectural space of S.M.A.K. By refusing to show what exists and reconsidering it in the new, the exhibition connects to fundamental questions about progress and economy and asks when something ceases to be there, and how something new comes into being.

Nairy Baghramian | Déformation Professionnelle is co-organized by S.M.A.K., Ghent and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

The exhibition in S.M.A.K. is curated by Martin Germann.

Nairy Baghramian was born 1971 in Isfahan, Iran; she lives and works in Berlin since 1984. Her most significant exhibitions include Slip of the Tongue, Punta della Dogana, Venice (2015); French Curve / Slip of the Tongue, Art Institute of Chicago (2014); Fluffing the Pillows, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2013); Retainer, SculptureCenter, New York (2013); Glasgow International Festival of Visual Arts, Glasgow (2012); Fluffing the Pillows, Kunsthalle Mannheim (2012); Venice Biennale (2011); Serpentine Gallery (with Phyllida Barlow), London (2010); Butcher, Barber, Angler & Others, Studio Voltaire, London (2009); Das Gespinst, Municipal Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach (2009); Looking is Political, Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2009); Affairs. A Semiotic House That Was Never Built, Neuer Aachener Kunstverein (2008); 5th Berlin Biennale, Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin (2008); Draw a straight line and follow it, Tate Modern, London (2008); Sculpture Projects Münster 07 (2007); Es ist ausser Haus, Kunsthalle Basel (2006). For her work, Nairy Baghramian has received the 2007 Schering Stiftung Art Award, the 2012 Hector Prize, in the 2014 Arnold Bode Prize and in 2016 the Zurich Art Prize.