YARAT Contemporary Art Centre is an Azerbaijan-based not-for-profit organisation that was founded by Aida Mahmudova in 2011. It is dedicated to showcasing contemporary art, providing it with both an international and national platform through foundations, galleries, museums, exhibitions, educational events, and festivals. Educational events include lectures, seminars, master classes, and the Young Artist Project ARTIM, which means “progress” in Azerbaijani.
‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter’ is YARAT’s latest endeavour, and was curated by Suad Garayeva, Curatorial Director at YARAT and Michael Connor, Artistic Director of Rhizome at the New Museum in New York. It is said to bring together new and innovative artistic pieces that demonstrate how viewers’ identities can be manipulated by images of bodies and characters. The exhibition’s title derives from Carson McCullers’ 1940 novel, which features several characters who are at odds with their surroundings, both physically and socially, and experience profound feelings of isolation and longing. The exhibition reconfigures these emotional modes within a more contemporary context – the Internet.
Indeed, international artists such as Neil Beloufa, Hannah Black, Camille Henrot, Parker Ito, Bunny Rogers, Jasper Spicero and Lu Yang have reportedly leveraged a range of media to explore the dynamics between society and its images, specifically through themes of ownership and visual identity.
Pierre Huyghe and Phillipe Parreno’s seminal project, No Ghost Just a Shell (1999- 2002), is the exhibition’s pièce de résistance. It features videos that display the artistic reinvention of an anime character. While these artists are said to be drawn to the emptiness of their character, the other works in the exhibition explore the concept of the onscreen image being more than just a shell, as fictional characters affect – and are affected by – the outside world. Indeed, artist Bunny Rogers portrays herself in her art as characters from animated television series that have been transported to the Columbine High School library, the site of a horrific school shooting in the late 1990’s. This incident has long been considered as a consequence of the shooters’ preoccupation with violent video games.
A still from ‘One Million Kingdoms’, a 2001 animated film by Pierre Huyghe. Duration 7 mins. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.
Other works featured in the exhibition highlight the ways in which the television screen is a prime space for the distortion of physical norms. Indeed, Camille Henrot’s drawings are inspired by a music video by popular American musician Nicki Minaj, and are said to highlight the interplay between the ghosts of colonialism, exoticism and racial stereotypes in contemporary onscreen culture. Yang’s explores similar themes, and involves a video game installation that stars a heroic, anthropomorphic uterus. Hannah Black presents a newly commissioned video work made with professional and amateur bodybuilders in Baku, whose bodies emulate Photoshopped fitness magazines and CGI film superheroes.
Suad Garayeva, Curatorial Director at YARAT made comment: “At YARAT Contemporary Art Centre we are committed to showing important and cutting edge contemporary art. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter explores a particular strand of art in the post-digital realm, and introduces these rapidly evolving artistic practices to our audiences.”
Camille Henrot, My Anaconda Don’t, 2015, Watercolor on Paper, 140x209cm. Image courtesy of the artist and YARAT
