Yay gallery to take part in START Art Fair
By Nigar Orujova
Yay Gallery in Baku will participate in the START Art Fair to be held by Prudential on June 26-29.
To be held at the Saatchi Gallery, London, START will host Yay Gallery's first UK art fair.
Yay Gallery was founded by YARAT, the leading non-profit contemporary art organization in Azerbaijan.
Opened in 2012 as part of YARAT's on-going commitment to growing local art infrastructure in the Caucasus, Yay Gallery supports international dialogue on the arts and shares its proceeds among the artists and YARAT.
The gallery's artistic agenda is focused on showing the most talented and promising young artists as well as more established artists from Azerbaijan and abroad.
The gallery regularly hosts lectures, readings, film screenings and workshops held by the artists, with the goal of becoming a platform for the exchange of ideas and experiences between the artists and the wider public.
A collaboration between the Saatchi Gallery and the Global Eye Programme, START is dedicated to supporting international emerging artists from around the world. Bringing together cutting-edge galleries from Asia, Europe, UK and USA, START is an ideal platform for Yay Gallery.
Presenting work by young artists Farhad Farzaliyev and Nazrin Mammadova Yay Gallery brings to the fore the first generation of artists since Azerbaijan's independence in 1991.
Reflecting the rapid cultural and aesthetic changes that Azerbaijan has undergone over the last few decades, Yay Gallery's stand will shed light on a new and burgeoning art scene.
Farhad Farzaliyev's Granny's Vocabulary series, 2014, considers nostalgia for the Soviet era, combining rudimentary Soviet textiles with neon slogans from his grandparents' generation.
Using Cyrillic script, which was replaced by a Turkish alphabet after independence in 1991, his work immediately speaks of the pre-independence era of Soviet rule and the tumultuous history of Azerbaijani script, which has changed officially three times in the last eighty years.
Nazrin Mammadova's Alti Agach series, 2014, uses majestic photography of the Caucasus Mountains, which dominate the geography of the region.
Interlacing their contours with plexi-glass sections of saturated color, Mammadova shows how the cultural symbolism of the Caucasian mountains is becoming intertwined with the rapidly developing consumer culture of the region, symbolized by the artifice of the lurid, mass-produced materials.