Babak Golkar is a conceptual artist whose practice critically examines the instability of meaning, value, and agency within contemporary socio-political and economic structures. Through sculpture, installation, and video, his work resists passive spectatorship, instead positioning the audience as active participants embedded within constructed systems. Rather than eliciting interpretations of what an artwork means, Golkar’s practice compels engagement with what it does, generating visceral or imagined visceral experiences that reveal the contradictions inherent in mechanisms of power, perception, and control. By employing strategies of deconstruction, recontextualization, and participatory frameworks, he disrupts familiar structures of engagement, compelling viewers to confront the instability of their own position within these systems. Rooted in an interrogation of agency, complicity and resistance, his practice engages with the conditions that shape public engagement, institutional authority and political discourse, complicating dominant narratives rather than presenting fixed conclusions.
Born in the United States, raised in Iran, and later immigrating to Canada, Golkar’s transnational background informs his critical interrogation of spatial, cultural, and ideological frameworks. By activating the audience as both subject and participant, his work engages with broader discourses surrounding performativity, embodiment, and systemic critique. Golkar’s work has been exhibited at institutions including the Vancouver Art Gallery; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto; Museum Villa Stuck, Munich; Fondation Boghossian – Villa Empain, Brussels; The British Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, where he received a Jameel Fellowship in 2022. Through ongoing research and material experimentation, he continues to investigate the limits of perception and participation, critically examining the constructed mechanisms that mediate individual and collective engagement with spatial, socio-political, and ideological structures.