Babak Golkar
The Return Project

From October 21 to December 9, 2023

Galerie Nicolas Robert is pleased to present a work from Babak Golkar's The Return Project, in our Project Room. Through his characteristically conceptual approach to performance, sculpture, photography, and installation, Golkar works to disrupt dominant narratives in meaning and authorship, calling value into question and challenging the logic of the art market. Since 2014, he has been engaged in a self-prescribed framework for performative interventions collectively titled The Return Project.

Each work begins with the artist wandering the aisles of large retail chains like Winners or Home Sense. Eventually, he selects an object based on its potential for critical and aesthetic intervention. He then purchases the object and takes it to his studio, where it is documented, altered, and re-documented with the price tag and original packaging intact. The altered object is signed and dated, a notice of authenticity is attached, and it is returned using the original receipt of purchase, to an undisclosed store location. Once reshelved, it is absorbed back into the realm of consumerism, creating an artwork that resides both inside and outside the art market. Although documented proof of the action is available in the gallery setting, potential collectors have no more access to the ‘original’ than any other consumer.

Oscillating between readymade and gallery-ready, documentation and performance, consumer product and art object, these works occupy a slippery space between collection, exhibition, and curation where consumer and producer are merely two phases of the same operation. Both mass consumerism and the unique art object are under scrutiny, but they are not pitted against each other. Instead, The Return Project upsets the hierarchy between high and low, embracing a discontinuity of production that offers a transparent critique of an economic system based upon the bias of desire.

Babak Golkar (B. 1977, Berkeley) lives and works in Vancouver (BC). Grounded in deconstruction, replication and transformation, Golkar’s signature working process is manifested in an array of media and object forms. Golkar’s research emerges from his interest in the relationship between space and human conditions in the contemporary world and aims to both examine and upend established ways of looking. By distorting assumed certainties of perspective, Golkar questions accepted cultural and socio-economic systems and ideological viewpoints—as well as their persistence over time.

Babak Golkar holds a BFA in Visual Arts from the Emily Carr Institute (2003) and an MFA from the University of British Columbia (2006). In 2022 Golkar was named the first international Jameel Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, U.K., where he has been researching the museum’s collection. Golkar has exhibited and presented works in national and international institutions, including Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver); Polygon Gallery (North Vancouver); West Vancouver Museum (West Vancouver) Aga Khan Museum (Toronto); Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (MAC); Sabrina Amrani Gallery (Madrid); Museum Villa Stvck (Munich); Framer Framed (Amsterdam); Sazmanab (Tehran); Sharjah Contemporary Art Museum (Sharjah); Fondation Boghossian - Villa Empain (Brussels); Institut du Monde Arabe (Paris) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London).