Galerie Chez Valentin announces the first exhibition of work by British artist Babak Ghazi in Paris this December. Babak Ghazi works often with found objects and images ranging from tables to mirrors, from magazines to album covers. At first glance the work seems simple, minimal, and obsessive in the way of adolescents adoring posters of their icons in bedrooms. Yet, in each piece of work poses a certain precariousness while built with an utmost preciousness that, there, Babak Ghazi elevates the significance of these images and points reflectively on their inherent meaning.
Having a focus on the vanguard music and fashion scene of the nineteen eighties, this exhibition continues Babak Ghazi’s interest in the model of the Creative Individual free to choose his way of life. This display of found objects and images, housed in Plexiglas cube structures, as if in a shop or museum, forms a ‘showroom of Romanticism’. Their factual presence together with their theatrical positioning recalls Minimalism, and suggests that the spatial politics of this movement prepared the ground for the self-reflexive subject of the 1980s, caught in an endless web of signs and simulacra, creating themselves through consumer choices.
The act of making oneself (into a pose, into an object, into a picture, into a package) projects a stage. ‘Subjectivity, as the innermost core of the private, was always already oriented to an audience.’ In re-presenting these artefacts Ghazi asks what kind of subject is produced? What content is promised? What freedoms are represented and what restrictions are obscured?
Katherine Hamnett asks us to ‘Choose Life’, Joseph Beuys appears in an interior design manual, Spandau Ballet imitate Delacroix’s ‘Liberty leading the People’. By bringing together these disparate elements Ghazi highlights their collective participation in rhetoric of creative individualism.
Jürgen Habermas, ‘The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere’