YARAT! to present social art project
By Nigar Orujova
A social art project by Azerbaijani artist Chingiz Babayev will be presented at the Park Boulevard Mall in the center of Azerbaijan's capital Baku on Saturday, March 30.
The "Positive or Negative?" project is part of the Participate Baku Public Art festival, organized by YARAT! Contemporary Art Space, a non-commercial organization founded by Aida Mahmudova in 2011, which is engaged in the promotion of contemporary art in Azerbaijan.
YARAT! aims to provide educational initiatives including lectures, seminars and master classes on a variety of related topics of modern art.
The festival's title itself sounds like an active call to action from artists and modern art aficionados.
The festival's program includes 10 projects, five of each are developed, realized and created by foreign participants from Russia, Georgia, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the USA. This year, almost all the participants' works will be interactive and will engage viewers both emotionally and physically.
Besides the basic program, the festival has an extensive educational component. Participants will have a series of lectures, seminars and master-classes, which will be open for everyone.
Positive or negative attitude
Chingiz Babayev's philosophical multimedia project Positive or Negative? will track public emotions in Baku by questioning people about their state of mind.
Every day people encounter challenging events, both positive and negative. The events - which can happen in socio-political, cultural and private situations - lead to variations in people's moods. Some minor negative instances 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 shapes and extends faster than the positive one. In combination, negativity leads to the shaping of public discontent.
Babayev believes it is primarily important to determine the source of the formation of such negative energy and transform it into a source of positivity. Only the spirit of optimism and love of life may help avoid negativity and ultimately form a positive environment.
To reveal the degree of the given problem among city dwellers, the artist developed the art-social conceptual philosophical idea of the project questionnaire that included the only question: "What type of events in your everyday life do you have to face more often?"
Babayev is a graduate of an art school, an art college and an art university in Baku, whose works are represented in collections in Azerbaijan, Russia, Ukraine, Vietnam, USA, UK, Australia, Italy, Estonia, and France. He has participated in a number of exhibitions and art festivals, acted as curator and gave lectures around the world.
The project will last until April 30.