Lecture

Vera List Center for Art and Politics and SculptureCenter are pleased to present Subjective Histories of Sculpturethis year with Lucy Skaer, Nairy Baghramian, and Josephine Meckseper. The artists have been invited to cite specific works, bodies of work, texts, or even personal anecdotes taken from inside and outside cultural production, and inside and outside “art,” to develop their own subjective, incomplete, partial, or otherwise eclectic histories, question assumptions, and propose alternative methods for understanding sculpture’s evolving strategies.

Working in sculptural installations and photography, Nairy Baghramian engages interior design, literature, and art historical debates around minimalism in order to comment on current issues of materiality, manufacture, and display. Her practice examines political and social systems of power, encompassing questions of context, institutional framing and the production and reception of contemporary art. Baghramians work possesses a sense of immediacy that favors the physicality of the object itself. Her sleek, polished aluminum pieces and cast rubber forms take on a corporeal identity, often arranged in intimate mise en scènes to highlight the absence of a body while imbuing the forms themselves with a degree of bodily presence.

Born in Isfahan, Iran in 1971, Baghramian currently lives and works in Berlin. Baghramian’s recent exhibitions include Illuminations at the 54th Venice Biennale; a two person show with Phyllida Barlow at Serpentine Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Aachen; Entr’acte at Sculpture Project Munster 07; and the Kunsthalle Basel.

Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”