In 2005 or 2006, Nairy Baghramian arrived for a site visit at Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland to find the pioneering artist Gustav Metzger was there, too. He was scheduled to do a show before her and was walking around the imposing space with the director Adam Szymczyk, when he suddenly became excited at a temporary wall that had been erected. “Oh my God!” he exclaimed. “I’m very happy that this is built in now. Otherwise it would be a totally fascist building, it’s huge. I love this unterbrechung”.
An unterbrechung is an interruption or an intermission. Metzger, the Jewish artist and activist who fled to the UK from Nazi Germany as a child in 1939, found the idea of disrupting this example of monumental neoclassical architecture to be politically potent. Baghramian would go on to base her whole show on that sentence. She left most of the space empty, arranging just a few pieces around that wall.
At first Szymczyk questioned the decision: “Do you know how big the space is and you only have these works?” he asked. But she insisted that Metzger’s neat summation of “a political experience of a space and also an architectural experience” was the only prompt she needed.
Baghramian is always looking for openings. For ways of letting the outside in. She was born in Isfahan, Iran, in 1971, and after the revolution fled to Berlin with her family in 1984. She has been exhibiting since the late 1990s, but it was taking part in the once-a-decade Münster Sculpture Project in 2007 that pushed her firmly into the spotlight.
From the outset, she has made her playful, deliciously tactile work in a constant back and forth between photography and sculpture. In her latest show, portraits of a young child sit alongside sculpted elements in stone and metal. It stops her from getting stuck on any one idea: “It keeps my artistic dominance in check, so that nothing becomes too tight and everything can just be what it is.”
This is more than the high-level theorising of an artist steeped in abstraction. In fact, as one critic recently put it, Baghramian’s work “pops” the very notion of art existing in a bubble. For her forthcoming exhibition, the artist is occupying the various spaces of Camberwell’s South London Gallery with large colourful sculptural pieces from her Misfits series. The show takes its title, Jumbled Alphabet, from that of a double photographic portrait of a little girl in a blue jumper, also on display. The child has tousled blond hair and yellow beads round her neck. She poses head-on (albeit from behind) and then from the side. When you can glimpse her face, you see she is looking directly ahead.
It’s not that the girl looks unhappy. But she is not gurning for the camera, either. “When people take photos of children, they always ask them to smile,” says Baghramian. “But if you just leave a child be, they’ll often look the way she looks here.” With girls, she says, it’s even more common that they’ll be asked to “smile, love”. And it doesn’t end with childhood. Just a few years ago, during a shoot, Baghramian was told she had a lovely smile and why did she look so stern?
In 2007, for Münster, she refused to submit a proposal. For many artists, she told the curator, it does make sense. But being asked to explain what she wanted to do in advance felt, she says, like she was using sculptures to please others. “Like you’re being asked to smile for the camera?” I ask. “Exactly.”
Previous installations by the artist
Misfits, 2021 (Jumbled Alphabet, 2021, on wall)
These sculpted bits of marble, cast aluminium and walnut wood inhabit a gallery, Baghramian says, “as if somebody left the space without cleaning it up. You don’t know if there is an order, or if things are already out of order.”
Misfits, 2021
While visiting the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan in 2021, Baghramian learned that the park the exhibition spaces looked out on to was reserved for children and their parents. This exclusionary inclusion – “a beautiful question”, as she puts it – resulted in a puzzle of a show that asked: Who is inside? Who is kept out? Who is in control?
Scratching the Back: Drift (Tortillon orange), 2023
For last year’s Met Fifth Avenue’s Facade Commission in New York, in the niches between the pairs of monumental Corinthian columns that punctuate the main entrance pavilion, Baghramian installed this and three other buoyantly coloured pieces. They spill out at you, frozen in metal and pigment. They refuse to be subdued.
Sitzengebliebene/Stay Downers: Dösender, 2020
This ongoing series of sculpted works came out of Baghramian being asked do a retrospective and declining. She wanted to make new work. She arrived instead at the idea of a sculptural class reunion for things that didn’t fit anywhere; things, as she puts it, “that have no reason to consciously meet”. She likes to exhibit these on the edges or outsides of spaces.
Nairy Baghramian’s Jumbled Alphabet is at South London Gallery to 12 January.
