Ali Ahadi and Babak Golkar of the Alibaba Conundrum
June / July 2021
ABOUT ALIBABA CONUNDRUM
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; They have conducted a published interview, participated in talks and panel discussions, and collaborated in making available critical texts and writings with regards 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 to 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 bazars 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 examine 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 the Griffin Art Projects in September-October 2022.
ABOUT ALI AHADI
Ali Ahadi (b. Tehran, Iran. 1984) is an Iranian-Canadian artist and writer based in Vancouver. Grounded in the intersectionalities of aesthetics of contingency, ontological analysis of language and politics of subjectivization, His interdisciplinary practice spans from site-specific installations to sculpture, photo and video-based works, writing and translation. Consisting of representational images, videos, composite objects and texts, that propose certain ways for approaching conceptual dualities, Ahadi’s work is constituted through addressing the problems of presentation and representation, monsteration and demonstration, and the relationships between aesthetics and contingent forms of abstractions that are irreducible to the conventional artistic determination.
His practice in critical theory involves writing and translating in the fields of continental philosophy, aesthetics and politics. Throughout his doctoral research, he has developed the theories of Thought-Activism, Poetics of that Which Is Not and the Visitor. The latter can be thought of as a reconfiguration of the category of the spectator and of the audience into the encountering subject position of the visitor. With the visitor, the productivity of one’s attendance to a work of art is a subordinate to their aptitude in embracing the contingencies of language and in maintaining the de-familiarization of conventional artistic determinations.
Ahadi is an internationally exhibited artist. His last solo exhibition, Shit Yes Academy (Goh Ballet Academy) was held at the Ag Galerie of Tehran, Iran. In 2012 he received his MFA in visual arts from the University of British Columbia, where he is currently a visual art educator and a PhD candidate in the interdisciplinary studies with central focus on continental philosophy and visual arts.
ABOUT BABAK GOLKAR
Born in 1977 in Berkeley Babak Golkar spent my formative years in Tehran before moving to Vancouver in 1996. He obtained a BFA in Visual Arts from Emily Carr Institute in 2003 and an MFA from the University of British Columbia in 2006.
Golkar been researching diverse subjects, refining a particular conceptual vocabulary, exhibiting works both locally and internationally. Select exhibitions and presentations include Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver; Polygon Gallery, North Vancouver; Aga Khan Museum, Toronto; Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid; Museum Villa Stvck, Munich; Institute for New Connotative Action, Seattle; Sazmanab, Tehran; Sharjah Contemporary Art Museum; Fondation Boghossian - Villa Empain, Brussels and Victoria and Albert Museum, London, among others.
