Exhibition Tour | Alibaba Conundrum

ADMISSION
Free

Tour Dates:
Sunday, April 2
Sunday, April 9
Sunday, April 16
Sunday, April 23
Sunday April 30

Join Griffin’s Indigenous Curatorial Assistant Emmett Hanly for a guided tour of the exhibition Alibaba Conundrum. Alibaba Conundrum, an artist collective formed by Vancouver-based artists Ali Ahadi and Babak Golkar, considers how the English language and its enduring global impact directly but quietly conditions everyday experience and how it surreptitiously shapes individual subjects and citizens by posing as the ‘norm.’

Seating available, masks and hand sanitizer available.

Ali Ahadi (b. 1984, Tehran) is a Vancouver-based artist and a scholar in humanities. His interdisciplinary practice spans from site-specific ephemeral installations to sculpture, photo and video-based works, writing and translation. 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. His proposed protocol of abstraction calls for what he terms a “monster”, an assemblage of a disorganized relations between the linguistic economy and the optical economy of an object.

Babak Golkar (b. 1977, Berkeley) is an artist working and living in Vancouver. Grounded in deconstruction, replication and transformation, Golkar’s working process is manifested in an array of media and object forms. His research emerges from his interest in the relationship between space and human conditions in the contemporary world, and aims to both examine and upend established ways of looking. By distorting the assumed certainties of perspective, Golkar questions accepted cultural and socio-economic systems and ideological viewpoints—as well as their persistence over time. He holds a BFA in Visual Arts from Emily Carr Institute (2003) and an MFA from the University of British Columbia (2006).

Lisa Baldissera has worked in curatorial roles in public art galleries in Western Canada since 1999, including Senior Curator at Contemporary Calgary (2014-16) and Chief Curator at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon (2012-14). She was Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria from 1999 to 2009, where she produced more than fifty exhibitions of local, Canadian, and international artists. She holds MFAs in Creative Writing (UBC) and Art (University of Saskatchewan) and a PhD from Goldsmiths College. Baldissera has served on contemporary art juries across Canada and internationally, including the Canada Council for the Arts, Royal Bank of Canada Canadian Painting Competition, the Sobey Art Award and as a guest of the British Arts Council outreach program. She is Director of Griffin Art Projects.