Dialectic of Failure - New Work by Babak Golkar

By Darrin Morrison,
Director/Curator

Exhibition: October 11 - December 7, 2013
West Vancouver Museum

Known for his inventive practice of
developing bodies of work that navigate the
spaces between cultural and socio-economical
registers, Vancouver-based Babak Golkar's
Dialectic of Failure is presented in three parts.
Each incorporates clay, which Golkar uses
here to speak to the painstaking and delicate
nature of compromise and negotiation
and

modernity, art and craft, modern reasoning

between dichotomies:  historicism
and traditional mysticism.

Golkar's engagement with the idea of
craft derives from his interest in the slow
process, which allows for a different model
of production and time for thoughts and
reflections; a model that can be studied
and adapted to address imbalances in
contemporary life.

In one component of the exhibit, Golkar
30

Resembling organs, these participatory works

presents terracotta "scream pots.”

Scream (detail), 2013, terracotta scream pot, by Babak Golkar. Courtesy Studio Babak Golkar,

Vancouver and Third Line Gallery, Dubai.

are designed to muffle the sound of a scream.
Visitors can pick up a pot and scream into
it; the diverse shapes of the pots give each
cry a uniquely repressed sound. A second
component includes a digital projection that
captures the act of someone forcibly throwing

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lumps of clay against a sheet of drywall. The
audible impact of the clay hitting the wall
is recorded, as are the marks and stains left
behind by the clay when it falls to the floor.
The third component, exhibited in a room
adjacent to the projection, is the actual sheet
of drywall with its accumulation of stains. In
the afterimage there are vaguely discernable
and familiar shapes, such as mouths and
faces. On the floor below are the shaped,
bent, folded and flattened lumps of clay, now
an earthy red/brown and fused permanently
by firing in a kiln.

Underlying these works are themes of
and

contemporary human conditions. People

suppression emotional distress as
are compelled to react, or to scream, in
response to fear or pent-up emotion from
continual and mounting pressures that are
often unexplainable by reason. At once poetic
yet literal, thoughtful yet mischievous and
playful, Dialectic of Failure points to the
complexity of our time beyond our binary
understanding of it. Golkar invites the viewer
to re-evaluate material and the function of
craft object as well as the function of art object
while considering the limitations of reason as
the sole means of understanding and coping

with challenges of contemporary world.

For more on the artist, please visit

http://babakgolkar.ca.

West Vancouver Museum

www. westvancouvermuseum.ca

Open Tuesday to Saturday: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Admission by Donation

Potters Guild of BC Newsletter - November 2043