Home, Sweet Home exhibition now on at Baku MoMA

Contemporary art exhibition at Baku Museum of Modern Art

In April this year, European audiences had a chance to enjoy the artworks of the most prominent Azerbaijani artists at Home, Sweet Home exhibition at the newly-opened Azerbaijani Cultural Centre on Charles Floquet Avenue in Paris. At present, an updated and modified exhibition is being held in Baku.

Home, Sweet Home is a collection of paintings, photography, installations, ceramics and sculpture, that are, in brief, somehow related to domestic issues. All fifteen 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.  

Featured artists: Faig Ahmed, Faig Akbarov, Tahmin Ali, Chingiz Babayev, Rashad Babayev, Rasim Babayev, Ali Hasanov, Ramal Kazim, Aida Mahmudova, Fakhriya Mammadova, Farid Rasulov, Fidan Seyidova, Sanan Alasgarov and Rashad Alakbarov. 

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.

Address: Baku Mudeum of Modern Art, 5 Yusif Safarov Street

More info: +994 12 490 84 04

Entree fee 5 AZN