Babak Ghazi

Biography

Babak Ghazi’s reinterpretation of teaching and learning emerged out of a gap within the university, which works to fix living ideas into established knowledge. By maintaining the gap and refusing to name, Ghazi wants to give attention to this excess form and content, working with its potential to invent something, or someone, new.

With this purpose, he stages informal spaces for students to reveal, share and manifest attitudes that speak of, and from, their self-experience, without the rush to identify or validate. He prompts ‘speaking’ in order to find out what wants to be spoken (via speech, writing and material experimentation) He aligns himself with the questioning of the student, maintaining knowledge as incomplete. This is a frame in which teaching is withdrawn and learning is not assessed. He engages students to extend their understandings and possibilities beyond professionalised art, by giving weight and power to the work’s intrinsically negative and critical force.

He was the course director of the Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art, Chelsea College of Art, an intensive, experimental course which encouraged a radically diverse cohort to work with ‘unknowingness…as opposed to professionalism’ (Artlyst). A 2017 collaborative project ‘rapport with students within the disciplining institution’ practiced ‘inappropriation’ as an unruly and incessant institutional critique. The same year he was presented with a UAL Teaching Award, nominated by students. Over 20 years of teaching he has maintained close working relationships with alumni, co-creating bodies of work, most recently an exhibition with Ana Teles at Cubitt studios, where for many years he had served on the Cubitt Gallery curatorial committee.

This approach defines his ongoing “Lifework”, a treatment of life and work as mutually entangled and disruptive. Lifework has been exhibited at Raven Row, London and Etablissement D’en Face, Brussels. The final public iteration of Lifework, at Arcadia Missa, London (titled with his name struckthrough) announced his self-removal from the gallery system in favour of following the anonymous autonomy of the work. This is continuously unworked and reworked in writing, kept unpublished yet partially revealed online in the website pr-vate.space.