[spectre] Gazira Babeli: opening & party

[Domenico Quaranta]

For immediate release

*GAZIRA BABELI*

Saturday, march 15, 18.00 pm


Fabio Paris Art Gallery
via Alessandro Monti 13 - 25121 Brescia
tel. 030 3756139 - Skype: fabioparisbs
www.fabioparisartgallery.com
 From march 15, to april 30
15.00-19.00 pm everyday except holidays


Second Life, Locusolus simulator 9 AM SLT
Party<->Crasher<->Party
Second (Real) Audience vs. Real (Second) Audience
         Anti-Invitation (No Invitation Needed)
         Crash the party! Crash your car! Crash the Sim!
         All Live!
         Eat! Drink! Barf! Love! Hate! Sleep! Dance!
         Do Art! Think! Fight!


Gazira Babeli is an artist who lives and works in the virtual world of
Second Life, where she was born on 31 March 2006. Like all inhabitants
of virtual worlds she is an identity construction known as an avatar,
but unlike them, she does not acknowledge the presence of a “human”
controlling her. In this short space of time she has earned attention
and respect with her provocative performances which explore the issues
of the body, space and identity in virtual worlds. Babeli acts like a
virus, unleashing earthquakes and showers of icons extrapolated from pop
culture, or spreading epidemics which deform the bodies of other
residents of Second Life. “Gaz” has become a multivalent term, and a
household name in her virtual world. The aura of mystery that surrounds
her has engendered a kind of legend, which quickly moved beyond the
confines of Second Life.

Gazira Babeli is a “virtual” artist, but her work is “real”. She
explores the body, space, identity. She compares her oeuvre with art
history. She talks about us. She is closer than we think, with our
multiple identities, our way of representing ourselves, our lives in
front of the screen. To those who ask her if there is a point in living
in a virtual world, she mockingly responds: “What about you? How’s life
in Microsoft Office?”. Seen in this light her work acquires meaning and
efficacy even outside the world which generated it, as her numerous
appearances in shows and festivals demonstrates. Now, in this solo
exhibition at the Fabio Paris Art Gallery, the artist presents a
selection of works that reflect the two fundamental poles of her oeuvre:
her world and her identity as a virtual artist. Babeli lives in a
simulated world, a realistic, 3D universe generated by castles of
computing code, yet “inhabited” and experienced on a daily basis by
millions of people. Her work explores the conventions and contradictions
of this world, addressing concepts like time, space and the body by
simply manipulating language. Her work is ‘performance’ in the purest
sense of the term: language which generates action. Bodies change shape
and come alive; giant towers collapse and then rise from their ashes
once more; mysterious forces and objects take possession of us. But
Babeli’s main work is Gazira herself, and the knowing manipulation of
her legend, as shown in the video triptych Saint Gaz' Stylite and the
movie Gaz' of the Desert (March 2007), the first high definition film
entirely shot in a virtual world. Babeli mixes hagiography and
slapstick, surrealism and country music, to tell the story of her life
behind the screen, midway between isolation and sociality, asceticism
and temptation.

Gazira Babeli has taken part in festivals and exhibitions in Italy (Peam
2006 - The Diamond, Pescara 2006; V07, Venice) and abroad (Deaf 2007,
Rotterdam 2007); and with the collective Second Front she took part in
Performa 07 (New York). A year from her birth, the retrospective Gazira
Babeli: [Collateral Damage] (10 April - 31 May 2007), put on in Second
Life in a museum-sized venue, represented a definitive confirmation. In
the space of two months the show attracted more than one thousand
visitors. Her work has also elicited the attention of publications like
El Pais, La Stampa, Liberazione, Exibart, Der Spiegel and Kunstzeitung.
Gazira Babeli is her first solo exhibition in the “real” world.
http://gazirababeli.com

The exhibition will also see the publication of a book, Gazira Babeli
(edited by Domenico Quaranta, with essays by Mario Gerosa, Patrick
Lichty and Alan Sondheim).


-- 

Domenico Quaranta

mob. +39 340 2392478
email. qrndnc at yahoo.it
home. vicolo San Giorgio 18 - 25122 brescia (BS)
web. http://www.domenicoquaranta.net/