Babak Golkar

Born in the United States, raised in Tehran and having lived between Canada and the Middle East since 1996, Babak Golkar has developed bodies of work, which manoeuvre and negotiate the space between these cultures. Examining the tension between pre-modern and modern traditions is often the direction of Golkar’s research, which result in production of drawings, objects/installations, videos and performances.

Golkar’s recent works juxtapose specific Modernist tendencies, such as the use of Minimalist language in modern architecture, against very specific traditions of the Middle Eastern culture, such as the patterns found in nomadic Persian carpets. In the series “Negotiating Space”, 2009-2012, the geometric patterns of the Persian carpet act as a blueprint for a series of architectural scale models, which in turn are extruded straight up from the patterns of the carpet. It is through this kind of juxtaposition that Golkar proposes cross-cultural re-examination and possibilities of dialogical contemplations on new forms and meanings.

Golkar was nominated and shortlisted for the prestigious Jameel prize in the honor of Zaha Hadid at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2011. His most recent installation, “Grounds for Standing and Understanding” in on view at Vancouver’s Charles H. Scott gallery. For it, he has installed nine small-scale architectural models on a large Persian carpet and has built three large-scale structures in the gallery based on the miniature models. Golkar is represented by the Third Line gallery in Dubai and Hilger Contemporary in Vienna.