Spaghetti Painting

I am an activist, designer and visual artist from Azerbaijan. I am engaged in performance art, street art, conceptual art and socially engaged art. I started with street art and graffiti in my hometown as a protest for free expression of opinion and art. After two years of undergraduate studies at university, I quitted the school to devote my time and energy to art. With my relocation to the capital city Baku, I connected to the artistic community. Through meetings and workshops with other artists, I started to focus on important issues such as civil society, gender equality, and social responsibility. After a while a started to focus on these topics, mentioned above, in an international environment, taking part in residencies, art festivals and workshops abroad. I use my art to create a positive impact in my community and challenge traditional ways of thinking. My work is inspired by my country's history and culture, focusing on the narratives of the places, people and things around me. Recently, I have been exploring the memories and traumas of the First and Second Karabakh war. My inspiration might be anything: my bed, my room, a park, a forest or the whole city. That’s for example how my ongoing project ”The Story of Boy with White Bed Sheet”, during the quarantine of spring 2020, started. I was spending most of my time in bed. For some time, I couldn’t understand whether I was existing or not, whether I was alive or dead. This experience led me to a performance on the rooftop of my house, where I waved a white flag made out of my bedsheet. All of my performances are including the physical participation of me. Literally, my intensive participation penetrates my artworks from A to Z. Sometimes, as in the case of public or socially engaged art, other people also enrich the process by becoming a part of it. As for the interaction with the audience, it is important for me to know how the audience reacts to my art. Here, I try to remove the question “what the author wants to say?” and introduce the one “what does the viewer perceive?”, because the viewer is dealing with the artwork, and not with the artist