Born in 1959 in Azerbaijan, the artist grew up at the crossroads of Persian and Azeri cultures then under the heel of the Soviet Union. Today, living and working in Paris with a French passport after a series of exiles that led from Russia to the United States with a stay in the United Kingdom in between, he still cannot shake the feeling of forever being a foreigner.
The artist’s visual poetry, simultaneously writing and drawing, explores the poetic and political possibilities of language. Rooted in the experience of displacement and marginality, his work explores the question of communicability. How do we interact with people who don’t share the same alphabet, the same set of references? How can we create a common space for relating with others? The result is a prolific body of work strongly influenced by the aesthetics of collage.
Xenopoetri
Dissecting language in its most concrete aspect—letters and syllables—Badalov reinvents a decorative tongue that is as much a battleground as it is a utopia. Drawing plays a central role in the artist’s practice. Giving free rein to his pen, Badalov covers pages of his sketchbooks daily, which then serve as a base for the rest of the work to unfold. Some of these sketchbooks are evidence of his graphic research. Others bearwitness to his learning to speak and read French. Still others incorporate elements gleaned from the street, often with a political content. Business cards, fragments of election posters, administrative documents, prescriptions, and photo booth pictures offer a kalei-doscopic image of a particular era while also providing humorous commentary on that same period. His drawings often start from existing images; with the line continuing the initial motif to create visual games. Badalov transposes this method to a much larger scale to compose his on-site murals, where he also incorporates paintings done on recycled cloth.
Works exhibited
Through a selection of historic paintings, drawings, collages and sketchbooks, along with a new wall installation especially created for our Espace Projet gallery, the exhibition gives visitors a clear idea of the scope and scale of this artist’s practice.
Rarely exhibited, Badalov’s paintings from the late 1980s already demonstrate an interest in collage. They reveal a formal vocabulary that mixes references to Russian Constructivism and decorative calligraphy. The titles speak of a process at work in a world that was—in the USSR of 1989—on the verge of being completely reconfigured. Européisation, Orientalisation . . . What comes to the fore is an off-kilter point of view that observes the world from the periphery, seeking its path from the experience of oppression and rejection. An anarchist, punk and homosexual, as he defines himself, Badalov had to bid farewell to his native country in order to conquer his freedom. Starting in the 2010s, he came up with a different way to embody this view by creating visual poetry that resists being assigned to any one language in particular while being dominated by the use of Globish, a simplified version of English that takes shape in exchanges between non-native speakers and is sometimes called broken English. It is a poetry forged from a broken language in which error is standard, a tongue that is beyond norms, brimming with accents and full of spoken words.
O suor da noite – Babi e Genet [Sweat in the Night – Babi and Genet, vidéo]
In 2022, Portuguese artist Mauro Cerqueira (*1982) filmed Badalov following in Jean Genet’s footsteps in Morocco. A poet of freedom and foreign lands, a delinquent, a man with no ties, no home, no country, Genet is a figure of inspiration and admiration. As a teenager, he longed to leave France. So began a nomadic life drawn by the magnetic pole of the Mediterranean. The camera records the trip that takes Cerqueira and Badalov from Tangiers to Larache, where Genet is buried, while stopping at the Gare du Nord and room 205 of Jack’s Hotel in Paris, where the writer died in 1986. Recording moments from rural life, O suor da noite – Babi e Genet [Sweat in the Night – Babi and Genet] is punctuated by Badalov’s reading of The Man Condemned to Death, a long poem written by Genet in 1942 while he was incarcerated at Fresnes Prison near Paris. In the French of a foreigner and with his singular pronunciation, Badalov pays tribute to Genet’s language. By looking at these parallel lives made of wandering, marginality, and exploration of language, Cerqueira brings together two artists who have made poetry a homeland beyond borders.
at Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne
until April 28, 2024