Chingiz Babayev's Positive or Negative at Participate! 2013

Park Bulvar shopping mall

Positive or Negative Installation Project

Exclusively for Baku Public Art Festival 2013

Chingiz Babayev

The presentation of the art social project Positive or Negative by Chingiz Babayev will take place on the 30th March at 19:00 on the first floor of the Park Bulvar shopping centre.

The project is part of the Baku Public Art Festival 2013, organised by the YARAT Contemporary Art Space. This year the festival is called Participate! which itself sounds like an active call to action to artists and modern art aficionados. The programme includes ten projects, five of which are developed and installed by foreign participants from Russia, Georgia, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the USA. This year, almost all the participants' works will be interactive and involve viewers emotionally and physically. Besides the basic programme, the festival has an extensive educational component. Participants of the festival will have a series of lectures, seminars and master classes, which will be open to everyone.

Every day people collide with challenging events, both positive and negative. The events – which can happen in socio-political, cultural or private situations – lead to variations in people’s moods. Some minor negative moments may affect millions of people, creating enormous negativity. To achieve and maintain a positive condition is much more difficult than to form a negative aura. To form positive energy, people need to have a positive sparkle, optimism, love of life and belief. Unfortunately, today such a combination is rare. Negative energy takes shape faster than positive. In combination, negativity leads to the formation of public discontent. From Chingiz Babayev’s point of view, it is firstly important to determine the source of the formation of such negative energy and transform it to a source of positivity. Only the spirit of optimism and love of life may help avoid negativity and ultimately form a positive climate.

To reveal the degree of the given problem among city dwellers, the artist elaborated the social art project with the conceptual philosophical idea of the project questionnaire, which was elaborated under the title "What type of events in your everyday life do you have to face more often?"

The project runs from 30th March until 30th April 2013