Nairy Baghramian
Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK)
NAIRY BAGHRAMIAN gives her audience nothing less than an aesthetic reeducation. Her starting point is an academic understanding of sculpture as a modernist art mediumin other words, as an autonomous form, one that is by definition of no use. But she submits the well-worn modernist trope of medium specificity to a series of multifarious overextensions. Baghramian’s work presents the notion of autonomy as a physical challenge, one that each sculpture has to meet individually. Rather than defying use per se, Baghramian’s works ultimately defy us. Again and again, the artist alludes to braces,