nameless

Nairy Baghramian at WIELS — nameless brings together several previously unseen bodies of work in dialogue with the post-industrial architecture.

Installation view, photography by Eline Willaert. Courtesy SLEEK.

by Nisha Merit, SLEEK

Iranian-born, Berlin-based artist Nairy Baghramian has spent decades forging a singular sculptural vocabulary that draws from dance, theatre, fashion, architecture and the history of sculpture itself. Since 1984 she has lived and worked in Berlin, developing a practice that moves across sculpture, spatial installation, photography, and drawing.

Her exhibition nameless, which opened last Saturday at WIELS in Brussels, examines the forces that shape the displacement and statelessness of objects. Baghramian reflects on the precarious condition of works that exist perpetually “in between” – liberated from fixed classifications or limiting environments. She conjures an urgency for a sculptural mode of existence outside the rigidity of language, codes, and names – a concern that resonates well beyond today’s geopolitical crises. For Baghramian, sculpture is not simply an object but an expanded way of understanding the world.

“Sculpture art has another dimension of understanding space and time"

Her works often appear organic, humanistic, even bodily, without ever settling into clear representation. They feel familiar yet unplaceable: haptic, biomorphic forms that hover between design elements, industrial fragments, and imagined anatomical systems. There is something slightly eerie in their presence, difficult to pinpoint, yet they draw you close as if they want to speak to you in a quiet exchange. In that, the artist stages a conversation between sculpture and its environment until the objects themselves begin to feel like characters – entities negotiating their place in the world.

“I have lived in a society that has rejected culture, so I know what it means,” she said in an earlier interview. “It is not sentimental what I am saying, I know it. That it’s a less better life if we would not have sculptures in our lives.”

This negotiation extends to the surrounding space as Baghramian’s installations make palpable the psychological dimensions of architecture. She seems to understand the relationship between an object and its environment as one of dependency, tension, and care. Her practice embraces things that do not fit, things that resist seamless integration, insisting instead on vulnerability as a form of intelligence. It is an artistic practice which is marked by compassion, humility, and ambition.

A seemingly practical detail reveals this sensibility with particular clarity: the mounts, brackets, and holders with which her sculptures lean, rest, or brace themselves against floors, walls, or open space. These connectors – often meticulously designed and conspicuously visible – establish a physical closeness between object and site. They expose the moment of holding and being held. In Baghramian’s hands, these structural supports become metaphors for interdependence, fragility, and the conditions that allow any form – artistic or human – to exist.

In nameless, this ethos takes on renewed urgency. Baghramian’s sculptures invite viewers to reconsider their own relationship to objects, to spaces, and to the invisible systems that shape belonging. The offering is generous: a call to pay attention, to listen, and to imagine a world in which nothing stands entirely on its own.

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*Quotes from an interview of Nairy Baghramian with the Nasher Sculpture Center as 2022 Nasher Prize Laureate.

More images here

Via SLEEK