The second exhibition season of Basement – the project room of FaMa Gallery in Verona – opens with the project Transaction Complete by Younes Baba-Ali (Oujda, 1986), a young artist born in Morocco and living between in Brussels and Casablanca.

At the centre of Baba-Ali’s art there is the exploration of systems and conventions embedded in our society, in order to compromise or modify their functioning from their inside. Through the use of videos, sculptures and installations – usually made up of found object – the artist investigates and wonders about the direct relationship between the viewer and his works. It is this relationship that transforms the ordinary into the unexpected in a way which is critical and poetic at the same time. In Baba-Ali’s works the use of technology is quite common and it is both a formal element but also a connective vector between works and viewers. The complex relationship between viewer and work is, in a way, similar to the condition experienced by the migrant, who leads a life among different social, political and religious situations; this multiplicity is to be found, in Baba-Ali’s work, in the shifting of perception of familiar objects and situations.

Transaction Complete represents a new step in Baba-Ali’s research. The idea from which this new exhibition project moves is linked to the current financial and economic situation that – in Italy as well as in many other countries – has led artists to explore alternative ways to finance and realize new projects. The Morrocan artist, with the usual irony which characterizes his works, focuses on the complicated but unavoidable relationship between artist and money through the realization of a mural painting reproducing his bank account number in big format. Everybody can thus make a bank transfer to the artist’s bank account and all the amounts will be recorded and showed by the artist throughout the exhibition.

A second part of the exhibition is made up of an interesting – though quite unusal – performative collaboration between Baba-Ali and Alessandro Orlando, one of the most popular Italian TV salesmen. The video consists in a TV sale simulation of some of Baba-Ali’s works. The language used is that typical of television, but a sort of short circuit is obtained in the very moment in which it becomes a work of art. The artist’s idea is not that of criticizing TV sales, but that of analyzing the process of standardization of their interpretation in order to adapt them to a TV commercial format that can be broadcast and received by the end-user. At the root of the project for Basement is the speculation on the artist’s role inside the complex system of the contemporary art market and on how the economic situation influences the artist’s choices – even the formal ones. Baba-Ali analyzes – with great irony and self-criticism – his own artistic career, recording the encounter between distant logics and investigating their results.

Born in 1986 in Oujda (Ma), Younes Baba-Ali lives and works in Brussels & Casablanca. Graduating from l’Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg in 2008, and from l’Ecole Supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence in 2011, he was recently rewarded by the prize “Léopold Sédar Senghor“, during Dak’Art 2012, 10th Biennial of contemporary African art. He has participated in several international exhibitions and biennials among them “Arrivi e Partenze“, Mole Vanvitelliana, Ancona (It); “Dak’Art“, 10th Biennial of contemporary African art, Dakar (Sn); “A5x2“, MAAC, Bruxelles (Be); “Regionale 12“, Haus für elektronische Künste, Basel (Ch); “Higher Atlas“, 4th Biennial of Marrakech (Ma); “BJCEM“ Biennial, Thessaloniki (Gr); “WRO 09“ New Media Art Biennial, Wroclaw (Pl); “Sketch Gallery“, London (Uk); “Brick & Mortar International Video Art Festival“, Greenfield (Usa); “Loop“ Video Art Festival, Barcelona (Es); “CEAAC“, Strasbourg (Fr); “Arte Contemporanea Gallery“, Brussels (Be); “Appartement 22“, Rabat (Ma) and “Sabrina Amrani Art Gallery“, Madrid (Es).

FaMa Gallery
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