Azernews.Az

By Nigar Orujova

A "Home, sweet home" exhibition, organized by YARAT! Contemporary Art Space, an organization promoting Azerbaijani contemporary art worldwide, opened on Thursday, April 18 at the newly established Azerbaijan Cultural Center in the vicinity of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

The exhibition features 25 Azerbaijani contemporary artists - including Faig Ahmed, Faig Akperov, Tahmin Ali, Leila Aliyeva, Museib 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 Nadjafov, Vusal Rahim, Nazim Rahmanov, Farid Rasulov, Mahmud Rustamov, Teymur Rustamov, Altay Sadiqzadeh and Fidan Seyidova.

The home could be defined as a "safety island" you can take refuge in while escaping from hardship generated by the big and non-amicable world. It is precisely here we derive strength for work and prolific creation, it is here we return being ready to drop or just with the purpose of sharing our joy and accomplishments. The home demonstrates resemblance to the micro-Universe full of stuff, i.e. planets, and each planet is sparing with our memory of the miseries we went through as well as joyful moments.

Every inch of home space is familiar and denoted with unprecedented feelings. Emotional background of the home definitely determines and influence over our capacity to transmit good and harmony to other people, we ourselves and future of the generations-to-come are strongly dependent on the background of emotions. Just upon becoming adults we are able to realize that our childhood`s endowment still exerts influence, how unbelievably sometimes the house of our youth echoes in our adulthood. Importance of such awareness remains constant yet numerous social determinants are affected for last decades.

"Home" issues became the point of reference for 25 contemporary artists of Azerbaijan within the framework of newly-established "Home, sweet home" exhibition. The reference is partly explained by their effort to depict a fundamentally new aspect of family hearts, partly by pretty conservative homesickness. Female images are integral part of home watcher images. As family institution is strongly protected in the Caucasus, a housewife image used to be a personification of splendid stability and order rather than female self-renunciation. However, rapidly changing world leaves no space for predominance of previously universally accepted gender stereotypes both in family and social relations.

Young women are less inclined to accept the idea they could only develop as wives and mothers-to-be. It is not uncommon nowadays to see families with female breadwinners responsible for welfare and househusbands seeing to it that the home is in order. Such modern partnerships coexist with patriarchal households looking out for firmness of the customs and leaving female personality in the shadow of other family members. In this family mode, women strive to satisfy their relatives and household and retain the status of a perfect housewife.

What conclusions might such ardent desire of getting rid of regular gender roles generate? Might it shake the basic pillars of the household or such a mode just represents recently emerged phase of evolutional development of the society?
Material world is not exclusion; it was also subject to changes. 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 trendy stuff.

There is something behind Azerbaijani Cultural Center in Paris hosting "Home, sweet home" exhibition; it rather bringing up burning questions than responds.

Most art pieces exhibited are somehow related with issues of home, comfort and family hearth as well as convey cordiality and energy of the cultural homeland of the authors. Artists` view transforms habitual Baku landscape and urban scenes (works by Museib) and customary interiors (in artworks by Farid Rasulov).

Orkhan Huseynov and Mahmud Rustamov make the most regular stuff like ceramics and furniture opalescent.

Picturesque art pieces by Vusal Rahim, an emerging artist and Niyaz Nadjafov, 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 Ahmed 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.