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Babi Badalov’s Demodernisation

Installation view, ‘Babi Badalov. For The Wall, For The World’, 2016, Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Jérôme Poggi
Anders Kreuger considers Babi Badalov’s ‘think-things’, and his Instagram account, as projects of demodernisation. How does one write about a fellow human being who chooses a bare life over an embedded one – a fellow human being who negates neither body nor self, but who affirms the freedom and the unfreedom of not being somebody? How does one write about a fellow human being who claims no immediately decipherable position in a hierarchy, such as a family or a society of like-minded others, which in this case would be other poets who don’t see themselves as writers or other artists who make words because they can’t do otherwise? How does one write about a fellow human being who lives and creates, alone but not afraid, in the eye of the storm of modern life, forgoing even the spiritual rewards that others might have expected from such humble exposure to raw and conflicted reality? How, finally, does one write about a fellow human being who reaches out to us without demanding our interest or recognition in response?