Babak Golkar

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A rocket is a ...
Biography
Babak Golkar was born in Berkeley in 1977. He spent most of his formative years in Tehran until 1996 when he migrated to Vancouver, where obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Arts from Emily Carr Institute in 2003 and a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia in 2006. Since then, Golkar has been researching diverse subjects and cultivating a conceptual vocabulary and has developed an active career exhibiting works globally. His subjects of research have especially emerged from an interest in spatial analysis in relation to our contemporary systemic conditions that are overpowering human conditions. In merging and examining originally discrete systems and forms, asserting underlying unity as well as antagonistic elements, Golkar engages a critical inquiry into cultural and socio-economical registers.
Recently he mounted a solo exhibition at West Vancouver Museum entitled, Dialectic of Failure, in which a series of small terracotta scream-pots alongside a video projection and two photographs examined the painstaking and delicate nature of compromise and negotiation between dichotomies—historicism and modernity, art and craft, modern reasoning and traditional mysticism. In October Golkar will be presenting a new installation at the 9th edition of la Biennale de Montréal and will take part in a group exhibition at Villa Empain at La Fondation Boghossian in Brussels in the same month. The first ever presentation of Golkar’s work in Iran will take place in a solo exhibition at Sazman Ab gallery in Tehran.
Golkar works and resides in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Professional Life
Babak Golkar’s concept-driven artistic practice extends effortlessly across diverse medium, ranging from drawing, video, sculpture and site-specific installation while maintaining focus in its subjects and issues addressed. His work primarily explores the psychological effects on the observer resulting from the use of architecture.Golkar sees architectural structures as psychological spaces, not just physical ones. His use of architecture as a visual language in his works revolves around his interest in “affecting” the observer. In a conversation with Babak, he explained that through architecture he is able to reflect on interrelated notions of movement, control, affect and memory. “It is all about what a piece does to an observer, as opposed to what it means or any other preconceived notions of art,” he states.Architectural structures in Golkar’s work function like triggers that create psychological spaces from the viewer’s imaginary into his consciousness, or semotically speaking, act as a signifier to a signified that exists beyond the immediate object of observation, be it an elusive space or a collective of images/spatial histories/realities/imaginaries that exist in the viewer’s psyche, an ethereal plane.Despite the complex use of architecture in his work, Golkar still references the most basic artistic traditions like illusion, distortion, and figure/ground relationship. The clever use of scale in the works and their intervention with physical space manipulates the figure/ground relationship of the observers and causes the mind to be in a constant state of flux, attempting to resituate itself in relation to both the work and the space it is in. Subsequently, the relation of the body to the work becomes dynamic, causing the observer to mentally and physically navigate their surroundings using architecture as a grid for movement through space. The observer’s role in turn changes to become that of a subject to the work itself. Thus, through the elegant use of architectural references, Golkar shifts the conceptual framework and perspective by reversing the roles of the subject and the object of his works thus tempting the observer to view things from different perspectives and find new meanings to ‘not so new’ realities.
Selected Works
Grounds for Standing and Understanding, 2013.
"The carpet skyscraper works of iranian artist Babak Golkar draw a relationship between the two dimensional and three dimensional, architecture
and art, and ultimately - the associations with the much-debated tension between east and west. through extruding the elaborate ornamental
patterning of nomadic persian carpets, the pieces generate a dynamic visual and conceptual reflection on existent cultural barriers.
they do not only reference the erected symbols of western patriotism, they also bring attention to the emerging megapolis’ and the advance of
oil powered arab countries."
Awards and Accolades
A finalist for Islam-inspired Jameel award: Negotiating the space for possible coexistence no 3 by Babak Golkar
Gallery Representations
The Third Line
Hilger Contemporary
[http://www.waapart.com/editions/black-squared#1 WAAP Edition Project]
Babak Golkar is among the list of Canadian artists BiennaleOnline, which claims to be the first art biennial taking place entirely on the Internet. 180 artists took part in this first edition, which officially opened on April 26, 2013.

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