Nairy Baghramian

Kurimanzutto is pleased to present the second phase of Titan, an ongoing project series in a solitary phone booth, conceived by the artist Damián Ortega and Bree Zucker. Initially launched as a group exhibition, the Titan project now begins a new stage, focused on a single kiosk, like a pin on a map, at the corner of Sixth Avenue and West 53rd Street in New York City. During the course of the year, six individual voices will each present a solo project, using the phone booth kiosk as they see fit.

Nairy Baghramian inaugurates the solo project sequence, with the debut of Jumbled Alphabet, 2021. Three portraits capture a child’s face turning away, giving the viewer the proverbial cold shoulder. Composed as a radiographic study, the girl’s grumpy expression embodies the poetic streak of an unruly child, suggesting this position as a creative, critical state of mind, to be extended.

Baghramian’s work has often made reference to historic relationships between subject and object, and their perceived independence, as a means to interrogate ideological norms surrounding the traditional understanding of the artist and the artistic offspring. Here, the title of the work, Jumbled Alphabet, hints at the phonetic worksheets filled with scrambled letters that must be unscrambled to form complete words, and are often used as training tools for children learning to read. In Baghramian’s three portraits, the standard markers of a child’s happy portrait have gone awry. Reveling in her imperfection, a sense of play emerges. The portraits remind us how all too often we heedlessly take the bait, letting our cognitive abilities kick in for orderly completion. Now, in a sky blue world where offspring act up, escape is possible.

This work is presented in tandem to Baghramian’s upcoming exhibition, Misfits, curated by Bruna Roccasalva at Fondazione Furla and Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan in 2021. Nairy Baghramian is represented courtesy of Marian Goodman, New York / London / Paris; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin / Cologne / New York; and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York. We extend our special thanks and gratitude, to Marian Goodman Gallery, for its collaboration in this project.