YARAT annouces Home, Sweet Home at Azerbaijani Cultural Centre in Paris

Home, Sweet Home exhibition, organised by YARAT Contemporary Art Space, opens at the Azerbaijani Cultural Center in Paris on 18th April 2013, and features a collection of paintings, photography, installations, ceramics and sculpture, that are, in brief, somehow related to domestic issues. All the artists, in each of their specific styles, ponder 'heart and home', striving to depict it with a fundamentally new image yet still somewhat connected to a pleasant and conventional nostalgia. They strongly focus on the world of household objects - simple and regular, actual, memorable and even imaginary.  

The home could be defined as an 'island of safety' on which you can take refuge while escaping from hardships generated by the big and malevolent world. It is precisely here where we derive strength for work and prolific creation, it is to here we return, ready to drop or just with the aim of sharing our joy and accomplishments. The home resembles a micro universe, full of things, like planets, and each planet is a memory of the miseries we went through as well as joyful moments.

Every inch of home space is familiar and connected with unprecedented feelings. The emotional background of the home definitely determines and influences our capacity to transmit good and harmony to other people, ourselves and future generations are strongly dependent on this emotional background. On becoming adults we are able to realise that our childhood still exerts influence, and that, unbelievably sometimes, the house of our youth echoes in our adulthood. The importance of such awareness remains constant, yet numerous social determinants change over decades.

Female images are integral to the 'home' images. As the family institution is strongly protected in the Caucasus, the image of the housewife used to be the personification of splendid stability and order rather than female self-renunciation. However, the rapidly changing world leaves no space for the predominance of previously universally accepted gender stereotypes, both in family and social relations.

What conclusions might such an ardent desire of getting rid of definite gender roles generate? Might it shake the basic pillars of the household or might such a mode just represent a recently emerged phase of evolutional development in society?

The material world is not excluded - it too is also subject to change. Inherited household utensils and appliances, previously facilitating intergenerational continuity from time immemorial, start to lose their ground. A 'grandpa's armchair' or a 'granny's antique set' tend to yield to the times and to the permanent rush for modern and trendy things. A sentimental and naively romantic style gradually passes into history, coupled with old-fashioned furniture, while functional and ergonomic design is getting the upper hand. We are still wondering if the 'home' will finally lose its integral warmth.

The Home, Sweet Home exhibition brings up burning questions rather than answers. Most art pieces exhibited are somehow related with issues of home, comfort and family groups as well as conveying the cordiality and energy of the cultural homeland of the authors. Artists' views transform the habitual Baku landscape and urban scenes (works by Museyib) and customary interiors (in artworks by Farid Rasulov). Orkhan Huseynov and Makhmud Rustamov make the most regular stuff like ceramics and furniture opalescent. Picturesque art pieces by Vusal Rahim, an emerging artist and Niyaz Najafov, a venerable painter, open tiny doors of the housewife's world, a mysterious space of saucepans, cutters, detergents and washing machines. Irrespective of uncustomary graphic solution, carpets by Faig Akhmad beam radiance and revive in memory newest possibilities for habitual technics in art. All works conveys ideas of lifestyle and comfort zone of authors, zones and spaces that meet best their requirements.

Twenty-five contemporary artists from Azerbaijan will participate at this event: Faig Ahmed, Faig Akperov, Tahmin Ali, Leyla Aliyeva, Museyib Amirov, Chingiz Babayev, Rashad Babayev, Rasim Babayev, Irina Eldarova, Ali Hasanov, Arif Huseynov, Orkhan Huseynov, Sitara Ibragimova, Ramal Kazimov, Aida Mahmudova, Fakhriyya Mammadova, Vugar Muradov, Niyaz Najafov, Vusal Rahim, Nazim Rahmanov, Farid Rasulov, Mahmud Rustamov, Teymur Rustamov, Altai Sadizhadeh and Fidan Seyidova.

The newly-opened Azerbaijan Cultural Centre is located at 1 Avenue Charles Floquet, 75007 Paris, in the neighborhood of the Eiffel Tower.