INCA: 2 West Roy St. Seattle, WA, 98110
Exhibition: 16 June – 11 July 2016
Opening: 16 June 7:00-9:00pm
Opening hours: Wednesday-Saturday 4-8pm
Curated by Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas
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Institute for New Connotative Action is proud to announce a special exhibition of Babak Golkar’s La Collection Imaginaire.
What constitutes an art object? Are its status and value still contingent on an artist’s declaration or its institutional frame? Under the working title La Collection Imaginaire, Babak Golkar has designed a an exchange system with artists based on a long-term studio-based dialogue. For this exhibition at INCA, Golkar has selected works from the growing body of La Collection Imaginaire: the final project will contain works by around one hundred contemporary artists. This exhibition will be the debut showing of this work in the United States and includes artists Ghazaleh Avarzamani, Michael Love, Charlene Vickers and Ryan Peter. La Collection Imaginaire’s process explores invisible structures and the soft and hard incentives governing the contemporary arts. La Collection Imaginaire investigates and critiques the working conditions for contemporary artists, disrupting art as a practice. This project also examines an artist’s vulnerability as an artist practicing within and governed by the same system. It is customary for artists to exchange works with one another, however La Collection Imaginaire is a system for new production of artworks meant for circulation. The ancient economic framework of bartering is appropriated and applied to the sector of contemporary arts for the purpose of sharing economic benefits. (Golkar’s work is in collections, and the artists who Golkar invites to participate in La Collection Imaginaire thus enter into this circulation.) Through this process, Golkar unravels rigid subject positions by shifting between roles as artist, curator, collector, representative, mediator, researcher and archivist.
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Babak Golkar was born in Berkeley, California in 1977. He spent most of his formative years in Tehran until 1996 when he migrated to Vancouver, where he obtained an MFA from the University of British Columbia in 2006. Since then, Golkar has been researching diverse subjects and cultivating a conceptual vocabulary and has developed an active career exhibiting works globally. Recently he mounted a solo exhibition at West Vancouver Museum, participated in the 9th edition of la Biennale de Montréal, a group exhibition at Villa Empain at La Fondation Boghossian in Brussels, a solo exhibition at Sazman Ab gallery in Tehran and a solo show the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Offsite. Babak works and resides in Vancouver, British Columbia.
