Between Moment and Soil

In a world where petrifying images of war, invasion and social conflicts are portrayed before our eyes day by day; where exotic subjects allure the artists to speak art, exploiting a keen and cautious view, Babak Haghi seeks his reality by exploring his surrounding geography. He takes long enough to reach out for his own reality through nostalgic labyrinth. In his previous series, “Those Bright Days” (2016), “The Twelfth Strike” (2017), Haghi finds himself at a bizarre distance from his past. When those days stay a remote fantasy in a rather blurred background, while as a photographer, he premeditatedly tries to shove them back. He liberates himself from nostalgia and within a delicate Animatic composition of utterly white and bright background shaded by somber and bland colors, he discerns an abstract poetry. Nevertheless, the present series “Between Moment and Soil” is a rise from a prolonged labyrinth. An audacious yet peaceful confrontation with reality.

A place where body becomes nature and nature integrates with life; where gender clichés are blown away by figures united with their essence. An elegant Animatic performance interwoven with an either amiable or overly harsh context. In this series, Babak Haghi makes peace with his geography where he steps far from that mingled photomontage cocoon and previous pale abstracts while a fluid dialectic begins flowing – human as a natural being and nature as a matrix for existence – and this boundlessness yields in a deed-like record, naked like his own nature.

Dr. Esha Sadr / Inter-major artist / November 2019, California