Spacial Relations

Susanne Titz
Director, Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany

I first saw Nairy’s work when she had an amazing installation titled Fourth Wall/Two Female Protagonists (2005) as part of her solo show at Galerie Nagel Draxler in Cologne, Germany, that year. I realized she was thinking about the way a work can be both art and display as well. This interested me because I felt she was producing the entire space, as both artist and curator—an approach that connects to the Museum Abteiberg’s history. Artists collaborated with Johannes Cladders during his directorship here (1967–85), as a way of thinking about the institution, thinking about the role of art in the public sphere.

When I invited her for a solo exhibition, Nairy responded that it would be much better to work in a constellation. The show we eventually planned, “Open Dress” (2014–15), with Lukas Duwenhögger, Lutz Bacher and Danh Võ, was more like a play: the museum was the stage, and it happened in four rehearsals. I like the term “rehearsal” because every part of the exhibition was in a state of flow. It was not set, showing the audience: “This is it, this is the result”. Instead the audience was invited to think about the possible reasons for what was there.

For the first rehearsal we hung Lukas Duwenhögger’s paintings, which were rarely seen at that time, alongside other half-unwrapped works and crates. On the floor was Lutz Bacher’s Big Boy (1992)—a work based on a puppet used in therapy sessions with kids who have been abused and who are not able to speak about things—but which has been scaled up about ten times. There was a 15th century Portuguese Christ figure in Danh Võ’s Dirty Dancing (2019) installation, and Nairy’s table sculpture from Formage de tête (2011), which always reminds me of an autopsy table or a butcher’s shop. Everything looked so rough and raw and so physical—very fleshy, in a way. For the subsequent rehearsals we produced a number of other scenes with the same objects.

I think when Nairy was working on “Open Dress” she was concerned with how artists were being controlled or defined by others and being put in a position where they couldn’t define their own exhibitions. She was thinking of the public presentation of art as something that needs to be determined and argued for by the artists themselves.

This chimed so closely with ideas I had about the rewriting of art history since 1960. At that time, artists were much better informed than the curators, art historians and critics, and in a way, they taught everybody to change the modes of exhibition and the terms of art production and art presentation. I think Nairy is an artist who always reflects all of this, while also presenting sculpture that is itself, formally, so autonomous, so seductive. Her work creates a discourse around objects and the sculptural process that she is undertaking.

Paulina Olowska
Artist

For a very long time, Nairy and I were always in conversation about our roles as women in art. We came from different backgrounds but we both had a sense of angst, and a desire to change the position of women. She was always inspirational to me in the radicality of her speech, and in the way she looked for answers through connecting to women artists from other generations. I’m a painter, while Nairy approaches things more from the point of view of sculpture: sculpture as a body, as a three-dimensional form. But we share a sense of narration, of building a story within a show.

In the 2011 Venice Biennale I loved her presentation Formage de tête, in which she worked with the idea of sculpture belonging to the kitchen. So there were tables, reflections, hooks. It reminded me of the film, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989).

There is always a sense of a question or a proposal in her exhibitions: the role of the artist doesn’t end at all when a work is made. For “Off Broadway” at the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco, she invited other artists to be part of a structure where works would come on and off the “stage”. At that time I had been struggling to renovate a huge neon of a volleyball player on a building in Warsaw. Nairy asked me if I had any work about that, and we chose a neon that said Dancing (2007)—another piece I tried to renovate in Warsaw. It was a good choice because it is like a public sculpture, so I felt it related to Nairy’s work as well as the theme.

When I saw her installation Scruff of the Neck (2016) in a collection display at Tate Modern last year, it gave me shivers of pride because I really feel that every time, she moves the ancient subject of sculpture forward. She really grabs sculpture and connects it to the oddest things such as dentistry, dog bones, the tongue, skin, lips and so on. It seems to relate to appetite. I want to see her work more and more because every time she touches a new nerve of corporeal sensitivity.

Nairy is one of my muses. She’s an absolute artist in a way, and I’m fascinated by watching her create work over the last 20 years and seeing her political engagement, her outspokenness and the way she really stands up for other artists as well. She is also not afraid to “play with the boys”. She can take on the big guys of sculpture like Claes Oldenburg and Franz West. There can only be one Franz West, right? Don’t fuck with Oldenberg. But Nairy, she does it in her own way. And she’s better.

Hans Ulrich Obrist
Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries, London

When I first met Nairy, she was doing a residency at Studio Voltaire in London, and I made a studio visit together with Julia Peyton-Jones. We were absolutely blown away by what we saw. Nairy told us about the fact that she had come out of performance and dance, and had started to almost break down choreography into sculptural elements. So her sculptures in that sense were always connected to the body and to prosthetics and fragments: that was something which very much struck me at the time.

I started doing studio visits when I was a teenager, and when I was 17, Fischli/Weiss sent me to see Rosemarie Trockel in Cologne, Germany. Rosemarie was really happy that I was visiting younger artists, but she thought I should also visit more pioneering artists. And she particularly talked about the idea that many extraordinary women artists hadn’t had enough visibility. She believed that I should always ask when visiting a city if there were pioneering artists whom I should visit.

So since then, I have applied the Rosemarie Trockel methodology, which also led us to make a studio visit with Phyllida Barlow, as many younger artists told us about her. The nanosecond that Artforum’s end of the year issue arrives, I always go to the section where artists talk about other artists, because I love the idea of the artist’s artist: the generosity of artists talking about other artists. And I always remember this tiny paragraph that Nairy wrote about Phyllida’s work. I thought it was fascinating, and that there was a real transgenerational dialogue, and so that was the initial prompt for us to do a two-person show with them at the Serpentine in 2010.

Nairy once told me that for her, sculpture should have the possibility to not fulfill expectations, and maybe sculpture could change what we expect from it somehow. We felt that both she and Phyllida were brilliantly fulfilling that in such different ways, and thought it would be interesting to combine them. There was some very interesting asymmetry about their approaches because obviously, if the work was too similar, I think there would be something slightly reductive. I always think that genealogy can be a problem.

Paradoxically, it reminds me of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s book on Sylvia Wynter, Dub: Finding Ceremony (2020). In it Gumbs writes so beautifully about the fact that her relationship to Wynter is not one of genealogy. It’s not like her work would be derived from hers genealogically, but that she is always thinking with Wynter. And that resonated with me a lot because that’s what I have always done with Édouard Glissant. It’s not a genealogy, it’s a toolbox.

Nairy has always shared my conviction that we need to protest against forgetting. In this digital age, we can assume that information leads to more memory, and one can see this in her collaborations with Janette Laverrière, the extraordinary Swiss-French designer. So Nairy has always had in her practice that idea of talking about and working around artists from previous generations whom she admires and then connects to with her work. The work has such incredible potential as public art, as we have seen in the last couple of years. Each time we collaborate, for me, there is another window that opens into another dimension. Most recently, I saw in her studio an amazing body of drawings which I had no idea about. I just think there are probably so many facets to Nairy’s work that we don’t even know about yet. It has only just begun.

Charles Aubin
Senior Curator and Head of Publications, Performa, New York

A lot of Nairy’s sculptures allude to the idea of a prosthetic, or extension, or replication of limbs and body parts. She thinks in a very direct, corporeal sense, and the materials she uses (wax, rubber, resin …) often have a kind of tactile appeal. They make a direct call to the viewer in a physical way. During a studio visit back in 2018, Nairy told me about an installation that she had presented at Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany—a collaboration with the designer Janette Laverrière called Entre Deux Actes II—Loge des Comédiennes, which was a reconfiguration of one of Janette’s designs from 1947, as an installation. It’s a green room for a singer. At the time, when she told me about this project, I was simultaneously in conversation with a space on Fifth Avenue in New York about partnering for Performa. It’s called 1014 now, but it was the old Goethe Institute building—an empty townhouse from 1907, facing the Met. I felt there was something to explore around its domestic aspect, and this is where the performance Entre Deux Actes (Ménage à Quatre) was eventually held.

What I think is very special about Entre Deux Actes (Ménage à Quatre) is the way that Nairy is a true collaborator. She has a studio practice that she keeps private, but she also often makes space for projects that are more open-ended in their relationship to other artists. The green room with Janette was done very respectfully. It was not Nairy as a visual artist taking over the legacy or what this older modernist designer represents. It was a conversation. Nairy created the conditions for a very mindful collaboration. In New York, she also included her collection of Carlo Mollino photographs in the installation. They’re erotic images that the Italian architect and designer made in the 1960s, in secret, with a series of women who he would dress for the occasion in wigs and lingerie. These photoshoots were a performance for one, and that was something that Nairy was interested in. For Performa, we invited the choreographer Maria Hassabi to join in. Together, Nairy and Maria were very interested in seeing how you can mix up, or turn upside down, the quality of some of the spaces in the townhouse. So for instance, the parlor became Janette’s green room, and the ballroom the site for Maria’s very intimate duet—a space where you would usually expect to find group dances, social dances.

Every time I see a show by Nairy, I feel as if I learn something new about sculpture and what it means to be a sculptor, whether as I said, that is the relationship to the body, or the relationship to matter, materiality and processes. Also, something that I find unusual and very impressive in Nairy’s work is that she does not really repeat herself, and yet you sense that her approach is consistent. Her engagement with sculpture, formally and conceptually, and her ability to push the limits of the medium makes her work unique.

Berlin-based artist Nairy Baghramian (b. 1971, Isfahan, Iran) was the recipient of the 2023 Aspen Art Museum’s Award for Art. The artist was the subject of a solo exhibition, ‘Nairy Baghramian: Jupon de Corps,’ at the Aspen Art Museum from June 22–October 22, 2023.

Laura McLean-Ferris is a writer and curator. She lives in Turin, Italy.

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