ASPEN ART MUSEUM
MAGAZINE
14
Exhibitions
Hans Ulrich Obrist Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries, London When I first met Nairy, she was doing a residency at Studio Voltaire in London, and I made a studio visit together with Julia Peyton-Jones. We were absolutely blown away by what we saw. Nairy told us about the fact that she had come out of performance and dance, and had started to almost break down choreog- raphy into sculptural elements. So her sculptures in that sense were always connected to the body and to prosthet- ics and fragments: that was something which very much struck me at the time. I started doing studio visits when I was a teenager, and when I was 17, Fischli/Weiss sent me to see Rosemarie Trockel in Cologne, Germany. Rosemarie
writes so beautifully about the fact that her relationship to Wynter is not one of genealogy. It’s not like her work would be derived from hers genealogically, but that she is always thinking with Wynter. And that resonated with me a lot because that’s what I have always done with Édouard Glissant. It’s not a genealogy, it’s a toolbox. Nairy has always shared my conviction that we need to protest against forgetting. In this digital age, we can assume that information leads to more memory, and one can see this in her collaborations with Janette Laverrière, the extraordinary Swiss-French designer. So Nairy has always had in her practice that idea of talk- ing about and working around artists from previous generations whom she admires and then connects to with her work. The work has such incredible potential as public art, as we have seen in the last
Phyllida’s work. I thought it was fasci- nating, and that there was a real trans generational dialogue, and so that was the initial prompt for us to do a two-person show with them at the Serpentine in 2010. Nairy once told me that for her, sculp ture should have the possibility to not fulfill expectations, and maybe sculpture could change what we expect from it somehow. We felt that both she and Phyl- lida were brilliantly fulfilling that in such different ways, and thought it would be interesting to combine them. There was some very interesting asymmetry about their approaches because obviously, if the work was too similar, I think there would be something slightly reductive. I always think that genealogy can be a problem. Paradoxically, it reminds me of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s book on Sylvia Wynter , Dub: Finding Ceremony (2020). In it Gumbs
was really happy that I was visiting younger artists, but she thought I should also visit more pioneering artists. And she particularly talked about the idea that many extraordinary women artists hadn’t had enough visibility. She believed that I should always ask when visiting a city if there were pioneering artists whom I should visit. So since then, I have applied the Rosemarie Trockel methodology, which also led us to make a studio visit with Phyllida Barlow, as many younger art- ists told us about her. The nanosecond that Artforum ’s end of the year issue arrives, I always go to the section where artists talk about other artists, because I love the idea of the artist’s artist: the generosity of artists talking about other artists. And I always remember this tiny paragraph that Nairy wrote about
Above, left Nairy Baghramian and Phyllida Barlow, Nairy Baghramian Klassentreffen (Class Reunion) , 2008, installation view, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2010. Courtesy: © Nairy Baghramian and Heins Schürmann Collection, Herzogenrath; photograph: Raphael Hefti Above, right Nairy Baghramian and Phyllida Barlow, Nairy Baghramian Londoner Türsteher (London Bouncer) , 2010, installation view, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2010. Courtesy: © Nairy Baghramian and Serpentine Gallery; photograph: Raphael Hefti
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