Zoom link: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_2x83cOwfThC4eg2ZmNlkaw
Join current artists-in-residence Ali Ahadi and Babak Golkar of the Alibaba Conundrum to learn more about what they have be up to throughout their time at Griffin Art Projects
Alibaba Conundrum is an artistic group composed of Babak Golkar and Ali Ahadi. Of Iranian heritage, dwelling in the English language, they are both artists, practicing in a variety of disciplines and media, critically examining how different ways of seeing, modes of subjectivization, and the manifestation of ideas are globally manufactured and determined through the hegemony of English language.
Over the past six years Ahadi and Golkar have been each other’s soundboards on their individual ideas and projects; have conducted a published interview, participated in talks and panel discussions, and collaborated in making available critical texts and writings with regard to the condition of art today. The group’s name signals their interest in questions surrounding the contemporary modes of representation both in art and economics, information dissemination, and the connections between the imaginary and the real enforced through the digital sphere.
The term Alibaba points to two disparate subjects: the Orientalized story of Alibaba and the Forty Thieves of Baghdad, inserted by the orientalist, Antoine Galland, into A Thousand and One Nights; and its contemporary signification, “alibaba.com”. The digital interface and the algorithmic logic of such platforms condition the contemporary citizen’s desire for seeing, resulting in a consuming automatism through that seeing. Inspired by the characteristics of the literary Alibaba, Alibaba Conundrum, however, uses similar strategies and aesthetics implemented by visual commodity bazaars such as alibaba.com to research and propose ways of questioning this manufacturing of desire through subversive art practice.
Notwithstanding in what language one is born, and regardless of the whereabouts of one’s living, Alibaba Conundrum speculates and examines how the English language is globally, through its cybernetic machine and media propaganda industry, conditioning the possibilities of thinking today.
Alibaba Conundrum’s first solo exhibition will be held at Griffin Art Projects in Fall 2022.