Alibaba Conundrum

Alibaba Conundrum is an artistic group and an ongoing project formed by Vancouver-based artists Ali Ahadi and Babak Golkar.

The project critically examines how different ways of seeing, and subsequently those of saying, are manufactured today through the hegemony of the English language, globally conditioning the possibilities of thinking. It also explores how  the link between the socio-economic structures of neoliberalism, Christian theology and the global institution of art (with its English grammar) maintains the contemporary habitus of thinking through diverse regimes of image production and media cybernetics. 

In the contemporary world, one is either marked and affected by voicing/responding to the speaking of English, or one is equally left unmarked and still affected by the inability to voice that speaking. With the omnipresence of English, every peripheral language (vis-à-vis English) attempting to connect to the world becomes a torsion of English. Therefore, one is either an English-speaking-thinking subject or one is simply defined as the negation of it. In other words, every English-speaking subject is also a non-English-speaking subject, and every non-English speaking subject is definitely an English-speaking subject. The problem is the extremely uneven and combined struggle for recognition between the two, the asymmetrical proportion of this dialectic. It is within this context that Alibaba Conundrum is a performer of the negation of the negation, a syntax, a grammar attempting to counter-symbolize the grammar of the institution of art. In a word, Alibaba Conundrum is an It.

Alibaba Conundrum at Griffin Art Projects
February 11 - May 7, 2023

Alibaba Conundrum debuted its first exhibition at the Griffin Art Projects in 2023. The exhibition consisted of an installation showcasing multimedia works, including video, sculpture, sound-installation, wallpaper, and a series of image-based objects. This exhibition was conceived through two interrelated components, a 28-minute video, titled “10+(-5) Commandments” and a constellation of images and objects that all can be perceived as derivatives of the video. What contextualized the constellation presented in the second exhibition hall was the video “10+(-5) Commandments”, which itself is a construction from another context, that is archive and history.