Utopia Utopia - Babi Badalov

In the sensitive and prolific body of work of Babi Badalov, words generate forms that convey meaning. A visual poetry unfolds, rendered across a diversity of supports—fabric, collages, drawings on administrative documents—oscillating between outsider art, classicism, Baroque, and punk. His obsessive calligraphy plays with the plasticity of language through wordplay, repetitions, and homophones, but also stretches of letters leaning toward arabesque. Close to graffiti, his art remains marked by ornament, revealing the filiations between drawing and writing that exist in the Muslim tradition, of which the artist is partly descended. Using salvaged materials, in an urgency-driven aesthetic, his craft demonstrates a rich appeal despite limited means.

Through his prism, fragments of history surface, from the collapse of the USSR to the Covid-19 crisis, from Joseph Beuys to Bakunin. Babi Badalov has traversed this history, from his native Azerbaijan and through his successive migrations to the United States, to Turkey, the United Kingdom, and then France, where he obtained political refugee status in 2011. Where language can rise as a boundary, Babi Badalov couples it with image and distorts it to transform it into a mode of relation.

For Babi Badalov, words are a way of being in the world. They evoke his reality and the political questions that traverse it: cultural hybridity, human rights, globalization, exile, identity, freedom of expression, the consequences of capitalism. We know how language is a normative system. In Babi Badalov, this norm degenerates, derails, and runs off in every direction. This emancipation occurs at the risk of mystery, but also of the absurd and of folly, which is, as we know, another form of wisdom.

At the Niemeyer Space, the seat of the French Communist Party, Babi Badalov’s poetic slogans, capable of bringing about other realities, resonate with the spirit of the place. A historic site, traversed by ideals. A place in which slogans such as 'Utopians, rise up!' or 'General Dream!' have resonated. Updating the image of the slogan from a voice that is at once minority, hybrid, and ambivalent, he proclaims a freedom that calls for sensibility rather than reason. Babi Badalov reactivates the power of words and their capacity to resonate, to unite, to draw other possibilities.

A project by the Palais de Tokyo in collaboration with the Espace Niemeyer, the seat of the French Communist Party, Libres comme l’art, and Poggi Gallery.