Babi Badalov: Xenopoetri

The Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne (MCBA) is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in Switzerland dedicated to the work of Babi Badalov. Born in 1959 in Azerbaijan, Badalov grew up in a world where three cultures came together, Azeri, Persian, and Soviet Russian. Now based in Paris and naturalized as a French citizen after a series of exiles that led him from Russia to the United States and the United Kingdom, the feeling of being forever a foreigner lingers, nevertheless.

The artist’s visual poetry, which consists simultaneously of writing and drawing, explores the poetic and political possibilities of language. Rooted in the experience of displacement and marginality, it explores the question of communicability. How do we interact with people who don’t share the same alphabet, the same set of references? How can we create a common space for relating to others? The result is a prolific body of work strongly influenced by the aesthetics of collage.

With a selection of historical paintings, drawings, collages, and notebooks as well as a new wall installation created specifically for MCBA’s Project Space, the exhibition shows the extent of the artist’s practice.

Rarely exhibited, Badalov’s paintings from the late 1980s already demonstrate an interest in collage. They reveal a formal vocabulary that mixes references to Russian Constructivism and decorative calligraphy. What comes to the fore is an off-kilter point of view that shows the world from the periphery, seeking its path from the experience of oppression and rejection. Since the 2010s, the artist has found another way to embody this view by creating visual poetry that resists being assigned to any specific language while revealing the dominant use of Globish, a simplified version of English sometimes called broken English. The outcome is a poetry forged from a broken language where error is standard, a tongue that is beyond norms, brimming with accents and full of spoken words.

In 2022, Portuguese artist Mauro Cerqueira filmed Badalov following in Jean Genet’s footsteps in Morocco. A poet of freedom and foreign lands, a man with no ties, no home, no country, Genet is a figure of inspiration for Badalov, and one whom he admires. Recording moments from rural life, O suor da noite—Babi e Genet [Sweat in the Night—Babi and Genet] is punctuated by Badalov’s reading of The Man Condemned to Death, a long poem written by Genet in 1942 while he was incarcerated at Fresnes Prison near Paris. In the French of a foreigner and with his singular pronunciation, Badalov pays tribute to Genet’s language. By looking at these parallel lives made of wandering and exploration, Cerqueira brings together two artists who have made poetry a homeland beyond borders.

Curated by Pierre-Henri Foulon, Curator of contemporary art, MCBA.

Biography
Babakhan Badalov, known as Babi Badalov, was born in 1959 in Lerik, Azerbaijan. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Baku from 1974 to 1978.

Since the late 1990s, his work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris (2022); the New Museum of Modern Art, Saint Petersburg (2018); the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp (2018); the MUSAC, León, Spain (2017); the Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden (2016); the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2016); Kunstraum, Munich (2015) and Karvasla in Tbilisi (2004).

Babi Badalov also took part in the Gwangju Biennial, South Korea (2016); the Jakarta Biennial, Indonesia (2013); Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain (2011) and the first Thessaloniki Biennial, Greece (2007). In Switzerland his work has been shown in group exhibitions at the Shedhalle, Zurich (2018); the Kunstmuseum, Bern (2011) and the Manoir de la ville de Martigny (1993).

Babi Badalov’s work is found in the collections of a number of important institutions, such as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg.

Publication
Pierre-Henri Foulon (ed.), Babi Badalov. Xenopoetri, with texts by Pierre-Henri Foulon and Julie Abbou (French/English), 52 p., 23 ill., Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, 2024 (coll. Espace Projet, no 5).

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Information on the full public program can be found here.
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