Panel Discussion | Alibaba Conundrum

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Ali Ahadi and Babak Golkar, the artists behind Alibaba Conundrum, will host an artist talk in discussion with a panellist to be announced, followed by a Q+A.

Working together as Alibaba Conundrum, they note, “This exhibition critically examines how different ways of seeing, and subsequently those of saying, are manufactured today through the hegemony of the English language, globally conditioning the possibilities of thinking. It also explores how the link between the socio-economic structures of the neoliberalism, Christian theology, and the global institution of art with its English grammar, maintains the contemporary habitus of thinking through diverse regimes of image production and media cybernetics (…)”.

Born in 1977 in Berkeley, Babak Golkar spent his 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 has 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.

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.