art. culture. azerbaijan.
a conde nast publication summer 2013 issue eight
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Meeting Michelangelo Boris Becker on art Russia’s sexiest driver Oldest church ever!
KEEP it cool Summer fashion in Baku ZAHA HADID speaks out
On life, childhood and being a woman
6
edgy design fairs
Create the world’s slickest home
P48
P54
P80
Sky high
Jazz queen
P98
The artist is infinite
P62
Empress of stone
P90
Killer lens New horizons
BAKU : BOUTIQUE LOUVRE, HYATT TOWER 2, 1033 IZMIR STREET + 994 12 497 79 90 I www.boucheron.com
LONDON : 164, NEW BOND STREET | HARRODS | SELFRIDGES + 44 20 7514 9170
from the editor.
leyla aliyeva, photographed by Frederic aranda.
lick through the pages of this summer issue of Baku magazine and you will notice a distinctly architectural theme running throughout. There is Joseph Giovannini’s interview with Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-born British ‘starchitect’ who created the newly completed Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre in Baku, on page 98; a summer fashion shoot set against a backdrop of some of the city’s most spectacular buildings, on page 62; and a story on a flower festival with an architectural theme, on page 114. This is no coincidence. Visit Baku and you can’t help but be seduced and amazed by the architecture, from our 12th-century Old Town, to the free-form buildings created by some of the world’s leading architects that are transforming the look of our ancient capital. Baku has a rich artistic, decorative and cultural heritage, and both the city itself and this magazine reflect this. As ever, there is plenty of other creatively intricate content to surprise you in this issue. Michelangelo Pistoletto, a leading light of the Arte Povera movement, talks to us about the importance of contemporary art, on page 80. We also interview Steve Lazarides, one of the main players in the street-art movement, on page 58, and Idris Khan, the thoughtful visual artist, on page 31. Personally, I found my meeting with the great French photojournalist-turned-artist Gérard Rancinan, which you can read on page 90, fascinating. A former war photographer who now creates striking artistic tableaus, he is utterly engaging. Two other cultural strains of Azerbaijan, my country, are also highlighted. Aziza Mustafa Zadeh, whose profile starts on page 48, is one of the latest and greatest exponents of the nation’s ancient musical tradition. Meanwhile Natalia Freidina, a Russian-born racing driver, is a key player in a very modern event — the worldwide City Challenge auto race, which we host in Baku every autumn. Read her story on page 34. The depth of the country’s culture and attractions, from its ancient monuments to its beaches, and from its luxury retail to its artists, are also celebrated in this issue. Azerbaijan is a place where the seasons are real: summer is a time to relax and take in the beauty of a country. Or, I hope, a magazine. Enjoy.
Leyla Aliyeva Editor-in-Chief
11 Baku.
In the heart of London’s Mayfair, moments from Bond Street and Hyde Park, Claridge’s hotel embodies the essence of English style. BROOK STREET, MAYFAIR, LONDON W1K 4HR TEL +44 (0)20 7107 8842 RESERVATIONS@CLARIDGES.CO.UK CLARIDGES.CO.UK
Summer issue
emil khalilov
** ** **
letting go without my father rhine maiden bang bang club one thousand and one sights millennium three
contents. 86
sketches ItalIan dreams
VenIce of the east
We pick six of the best alternative fairs for your interiors, furniture and general aesthetic wellbeing.
21
The founders of jewellery brand Faraone Mennella tell us how they just can’t stop spreading glamour around the world.
90
man the decks
keep on blIngIng
He has documented wars, riots, politicians and celebrities. Now Gérard Rancinan is a celebrity himself, famed for his tableau photo commentary on society.
26 98
empress of stone
28
De Beers, diamond purveyor to the stars, lands in Baku.
a quIet artIstIc force
110
31 114 34
Russia’s most famous female racing driver, Natalia Freidina, is the glamorous regular on circuits from Macau to Moscow.
40
Fashion and art have always been entwined: now it’s a fullblown affair, as the shows’ front rows decamp to the art fairs.
tWIsted metal
44
One man’s junk is another man’s muse. The Azmeco factory in Garadagh stages a new open-air museum.
jazz queen
54
Michelangelo Pistoletto was one of the defining figures in European art in the last century. Now he is back.
hIstory lesson In the first of a new series focusing on history in Azerbaijan, we visit one of humankind’s oldest churches.
121
maVen In a new slot, we corner art crazies in events around the world and get an insight into what drives their addiction.
122
128
destInatIon: absheron chIldren’s eyes
132
80
my art Tennis supremo Boris Becker talks about his modern art collection.
58 62
the artIst Makhmud Makhmudzadeh chooses pastels as his medium.
130
The Baku skyline is our inspiration for summer.
the artIst Is InfInIte
119
The world’s youngsters showcase their photography.
London’s leading alternative art dealer, Steve Lazarides, has plenty to say about Brad Pitt and Baku.
neW horIzons
Blooms flown in from around the world transform Baku.
48 126
Blink and you’ll have missed British parkour athlete Ryan Doyle in Baku.
haIl to the enfant terrIble
cIty of floWers
The lowdown on Azerbaijan’s chic summer escape zone.
Aziza Mustafa Zadeh on her life of inspiration and tragedy, and her pride in bringing her country’s culture to the world.
sky hIgh
secret screen kIng
catalogue
canVas
smart art
Zaha Hadid is one of this century’s most influential cultural figures. As her Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre opens in Baku, she talks inspiration and architecture.
A new type of film festival is connecting movies, art and music around the world. Fabien Riggall reveals the plot.
Innovative, personal and drawing on different cultures, the British artist Idris Khan is making his mark on the art world.
daddy’s gIrl
kIller lens
24
Baku’s Mini Venice is a refreshing antidote to the summer heat.
DJ David Guetta rocks the house in the Azerbaijani capital before spinning the tunes in Ibiza this summer.
grand desIgns
carpet chIc Karabakh is one of the world’s original rug-making regions.
135
neW baku People, parties, places and events.
144
tabula rasa Jazz singer Stacey Kent shares her impressions of Baku.
COVER. Photographed by CaRlOtta ManaigO. Styled by MElina niCOlaidE. Top by dOlCE & gabbana. Hat by HussEin CHalayan.
art. culture. azerbaijan. a conde nast publication SUMMER 2013
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF EDITORIAL DIRECTOR, CONDE NAST
ART DIRECTOR
Leyla Aliyeva Darius Sanai
Daren Ellis
MANAGING EDITOR
Maria Webster
ACTING DEpuTy EDITOR/CHIEF Sub EDITOR
Helen Crockett
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
Caroline Davies
EDITOR-AT-LARGE
Simon de Pury
SENIOR CONTRIbuTING EDITOR
Mary Fellowes
CONTRIbuTING EDITORS
CONTRIbuTING ART DIRECTOR CONTRIbuTING FASHION EDITOR
Emin Mammadov Natalie Livingstone Claire Wrathall Anna Blundy Josh Hight Melina Nicolaide
DESIGN ASSISTANT
Zijiang He
pICTuRE EDITOR
Liz Leahy
Sub EDITOR pRODuCTION CONTROLLER
DEpuTy EDITOR, RuSSIAN bAku MAGAzINE ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, FREuD COMMuNICATIONS CO-ORDINATION IN bAku ADVERTISING
DEpuTy MANAGING DIRECTOR pRESIDENT, CONDE NAST INTERNATIONAL
Claire Coakley Emma Storey
Tamilla Akhmedova Hannah Pawlby Media Land LLC Khayyam Abdinov +994 50 286 8661; medialand.baku@gmail.com
Albert Read Nicholas Coleridge
BAKU magazine has taken all reasonable efforts to trace the copyright owners of all works and images and obtain permissions for the works and images reproduced in this magazine. In the event that any of the untraceable copyright owners come forward after publication, BAKU magazine will endeavour to rectify the position accordingly. BAKU magazine is distributed globally by COMAG Specialist, Tavistock Works, Tavistock Road, West Drayton, Middlesex, UB7 7QX; tel +44 1895 433800. © 2013 The Condé Nast Publications Ltd. BAKU magazine is published quarterly by The Condé Nast Publications Ltd, Vogue House, Hanover Square, London W1S 1JU; tel +44 20 7499 9080; fax +44 20 7493 1469. Colour origination by CLX Europe Media Solutions Ltd. Printed by Taylor Bloxham Limited, Leicester. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is strictly prohibited. 16 Baku.
PRINT AND DIGITAL EDITIONS
PATRICK DEMARCHELIER
ON SALE NOW
Illustrations by Miquel Angel
rebecca rose
writes for the Financial Times’ How To Spend It magazine on vintage fashion and jewellery. In this issue, she reports on the sartorial style on show at the Venice Biennale. See page 40. This is a gerbera. What does it signify? It looks like a big, colourful daisy. In a word, what should summer be to you? Festivals. If you were a month, which would you be? February. I have five family birthdays in February and, of course, there’s Valentine’s Day so it’s a month I think of fondly.
Joseph Giovannini
is an architect and architecture critic who lives in New York. His work has been featured in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times Magazine and Interior Design magazine. In this issue, Joseph interviews ‘starchitect’ Zaha Hadid. Turn to page 98. This is a snap dragon. What does it signify? It is full of things to say, especially for the child ventriloquist in me, squeezing its jowls. In a word, what should summer be to you? Bellinis. If you were a month, which would you be? December, if it’s Los Angeles: the sky is crystal clear; October if it’s New York: the leaves turn and the air is crisp.
Thomas Lohr
is a photographer who works between London, Berlin and New York, and has contributed to Fantastic Man and Pop magazines. In this issue, he photographs Azerbaijani jazz star Aziza Mustafa Zadeh. Read her story on page 48. This is a bird of paradise. What does it signify? It reminds me of my dad’s winter garden. In a word, what should summer be to you? Sun. If you were a month, which would you be? October. I used to live in New York and the Indian summer there is incredible. 18 Baku.
Darius sanai
is editor-in-chief of CondÊ Nast Contract Publishing, and Baku magazine’s editorial director. In this issue, he interviews Russian racing driver Natalia Freidina on page 34. This is a dog rose. What does it signify? Una rosa canina, on a hillside by Lake Trasimeno. In a word, what should summer be to you? Hazy. If you were a month, which would you be? October, for its darkness and light and scent.
Karin Kellner
is a Milan-based illustrator who has worked for Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair magazines and Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. In this issue, she illustrates the artist Michelangelo Pistoletto for the interview on page 80. This is a hydrangea. What does it signify? It reminds me of my Italian grandmother and the early summer afternoons spent in her garden. In a word, what should summer be to you? Cicadas. If you were a month, which would you be? June. It gives me the feeling that everything is yet to happen.
Carlotta Manaigo
is a fashion photographer who divides her time between New York and Paris. Her work has appeared in i-D, Man About Town and Dazed & Confused magazines. In this issue, Carlotta photographs the fashion story on page 62. This is an anemone. What does it signify? To me it is the flower of the wind. In a word, what should summer be to you? Light. If you were a month, which would you be? May, a month of early summer days, flowers and cherries.
19 Baku.
Sketches.
{} Left: jewellery designers Amedeo Scognamiglio (far left) and Roberto Faraone Mennella, photographed at their studio in Manhattan.
ITALIAN DREAMS
Photograph by Kevin McDermott
Faraone Mennella, a New York jewellery brand with Italian roots, is attracting an A-list following for its inventive designs. TIM TEEMAN meets the founders in Manhattan to talk earrings, flirtatious celebrities and how they just can’t stop spreading glamour around the world.
ewellery designers to celebrities and the jet-set they may be, but Amedeo Scognamiglio and Roberto Faraone Mennella have always shared a workaday, unglamorous desk in their midtown Manhattan office. They sit opposite one another. They can argue volcanically, then – true Italians – ‘go for coffee as if nothing has happened. Even though our staff used to think we were about to kill each other’, laughs Scognamiglio. ‘Now they are mostly Italian so totally get it.’ He came to jewellery via his family’s cameo design business, which began in 1857. He is dark haired, giggly, ‘the more crazy one’, he laughs, happiest when designing pieces for the duo’s flagship luxury brand Faraone Mennella. Ritzy and
imaginative, these pieces include bracelets in gold and precious stones, such as yellow citrine and green tourmaline, shaped as bullet belts (for $170,000), or a necklace with jewels cut like whimsical tears, and gold-hoop earrings, a trademark since being worn by Samantha (Kim Cattrall) in the TV series, Sex and the City. They are opening their first store in Baku, at the Four Seasons hotel, this autumn. ‘We know the Azerbaijanis well,’ says Scognamiglio. ‘Until now they shopped at our London store. It’s great they’ll be able to shop at home. The 21 Baku.
Sketches.
{} Opposite: the Faraone Mennella store in London. Below: aquamarine, diamond and white-gold necklace.
women are so glamorous. When they dress for a wedding it’s like red-carpet dressing. They love our couture jewellery.’ Victoria Beckham has bought their bracelets for herself and for husband David; heiress Nancy Shevell wore their earrings for her marriage to Paul McCartney. Oprah Winfrey, Brad Pitt, Barbara Walters and Cameron Diaz are fans. Faraone Mennella’s signature pieces start from $1,500 right up to $15,000, while one-off designs can go for more than $100,000. The designers have been best friends since they were 17, growing up in Torre del Greco, south of Naples. They live just blocks from each other. In the office, when Scognamiglio got a second computer screen, Mennella felt ‘excluded’ and insisted a gap was opened between the screens so he could still see his work partner. Until three years ago they went to the same gym, before Scognamiglio, 40, decreed Mennella, 41, find somewhere else to work on his biceps. Scognamiglio is an extrovert, Mennella introverted. Argue as they do, they agree on the vision for their business. The Faraone Mennella brand is sold in cities including Hong Kong, Beijing, Los Angeles and Miami. Their Fifth Avenue, New York showroom contains a workroom where gem stones are cleaned and polished, with little bags of gold and a room where ‘we play dress-up Barbie’ with wealthy clients trying on the glittering jewels on display. Faraone Mennella is the blond, goateed, taller partner – though equally as handsome as Scognamiglio. Actress Katherine
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spotless, products look spiffing. ‘Armani does the same in his shop in Rome,’ he says. Both Scognamiglio and Faraone Mennella came to New York to study law, but really to avoid their families and military conscription. Faraone Mennella studied architecture, Scognamiglio was selling the family-business cameos. When he set up the Amedeo brand – contemporary cameos and ‘big freaking rings’ – ‘it was because
‘wE kNow ThE AzERbAIjANIS wELL. ThE woMEN ARE So gLAMoRouS. whEN ThEy DRESS foR A wEDDINg IT’S LIkE RED-cARpET DRESSINg. ThEy LovE ouR couTuRE jEwELLERy.’
Heigl once met Faraone Mennella in their concession at Bergdorf Goodman: ‘Wow, you’re hot,’ she told him. ‘So are you,’ he laughed – then sold her some jewellery. He is the more ‘restrained, sober one’: he plots when and which boutiques open, designing the spaces. Anything unaligned is soon aligned. He laughs that he sometimes gets his morning coffee, then sweeps through their Bergdorf concession making sure surfaces are 22 Baku.
Below, from left: green tourmaline, diamond and gold ring; aquamarine, diamond and white-gold earrings, both Faraone Mennella.
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I believed in the cameo business, but if we didn’t modernise it for people it wouldn’t work. It’s a specialised craft to practise.’ The men created Faraone Mennella in 2001, and Scognamiglio’s father was furious. ‘I completely fell out with him,’ says Scognamiglio. ‘It was very painful. He wanted me to fail, saw me as competition. He was upset that I wasn’t, so he thought, committed to the family business.’ But they struck business gold when some pieces were featured on Sex and the City and the brand took off. Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf courted them; Joseph, Matches and Net-A-Porter now stock the Amedeo
cameos, with sales bolstered by the likes of Rihanna tweeting about an Amedeo ring. Last year, the men opened a store in Capri, at which Scognamiglio’s father revealed he was ‘very proud’. ‘People had told him how well we’d done, we’d been all over the Italian media. It was too little, too late, but he wants to feel I credit him, that I learned everything from him.’ Scognamiglio doesn’t feel that wholeheartedly, but he realized that he has been using some of his father’s 100-year-old sayings, like: ‘Customers have to be your umbrella. The more you have, the more you cover.’ Faraone Mennella is now enjoying designing the Baku store. ‘I’m the boring one, the shy one. Amedeo is crazy,’ he says, laughing. ‘He comes up with something, then jumps to something else. I’m much more rational and controlling. But for 12 years we work at the same desk. We argue, but we agree on the most important things. ‘That’s the beauty of working with someone you know so well…’ He pauses and smiles tenderly. ‘Eternal trust.’
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Sketches.
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Venice of the east Between the spectacular architecture of central Baku and the Caspian seafront there is a new oasis. Mini Venice is an area of canals and stretches of crystal-clear water, replete with gondolas, providing a refreshing antidote to the summer heat. 24 Baku.
Sketches.
man the {} decks
‘Baku, are you having a good time? make some noise!’ came the holler from the dJ Booth, as david guetta rocked the house on a recent visit to the city as part of his world tour. the french superstar dJ landed in the azerBaiJani capital, following two nights in duBai and one in istanBul, and caused drama on the dance floor with a two-hour set Before Jetting off to his next gig in china. this summer, the 46-year-old lord of the dance is mixing it up in iBiza at pacha and ushuaia nightcluBs. are you ready for a Balearic Blowout? photograph by saBah sethi
26 Baku.
David Guetta spins the tunes at the Expo Centre, Baku.
Sketches.
{} Clockwise from right: diamond and white-gold cluster ring from the new Adonis Rose collection; diamond and white-gold stud earring; Adele is a De Beers devotee; the new Baku store; diamond and black-and-whitegold earring.
De Beers, diamond purveyor to the stars, has landed in Baku’s smartest street, bearing rocks.
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troll along ßber-chic Neftchiler Avenue in Baku (or better still, hop in and out of your black Mercedes limo every 20 metres – did you think those Louboutins were made for walking?) and you can dress for the finest summer ball in offerings from the Burberry, Dior, Dolce & Gabbana and Gucci stores. And now you can buy diamonds to match, at De Beers. The rock purveyor which has no peers has opened up a flagship selling its finest cocktail rings and necklaces. Adele, Kylie Minogue, Alicia Keys and Lana Del Rey are all devotees of the London-based jeweller. In industry speak, De Beers is a vertically integrated retailer: it digs the diamonds out of the ground, then refines, cuts, polishes, sets and sells them. The Baku glitterati just got a bit more glittering, but beware: to match that Adonis Rose diamond, you might decide you need a new diamondwhite Mercedes 4x4. Be brave.
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28 Baku.
getty.
keep on blinging
PRINT AND DIGITAL ISSUES ON SALE NOW
Sketches.
{} Left: Idris Khan photographed at his studio in Stoke Newington, east London.
a quiet artistiC forCe Photographs by Dennis Schoenberg
Innovative, personal and drawing on different cultures, Idris Khan’s work is giving him an ever-increasing profile on the international art circuit. Caroline Davies meets the British artist at his London studio.
nlike the previous generation of Young British Artists – loud, brash, self-promoting – Idris Khan and the new clan have been labelled by art critics as the polite, intellectual version; as one critic put it, ‘closer to F Scott Fitzgerald than Irvine Welsh’. Khan is in high demand. He has shown internationally from Berlin to Moscow, and exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery and Royal Academy in London, the Guggenheim in New York, and this spring at Art Dubai, where his dark canvases were imprinted with Sufi philosophy in the original Arabic. His work has appeared on album covers (the Editors’ 2007 An End Has A Start) and last year he created the cover for the London issue of The New York Times.
Khan shares his studio in Stoke Newington, east London, with his wife Annie Morris, a fellow artist. I arrive as she is working on a new piece, wielding a spray gun, wearing white overalls and a thick rubber mask. Khan is softly spoken, with a few weeks’ old beard which he occasionally pulls at while he thinks, careful to describe his work. He takes me on a tour, running his hands over the long wooden stamps engraved with back-to-front sentences, stained with dark ink. Much of Khan’s work draws on secondary materials; a 31 Baku.
Below: Khan first made the rubber stamps used for his work in 2010.
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‘i try to Create pieCes that holD the weight of what preCeDeD them, their Cultural baCkgrounD, whether it was the pain or the story of the work.’
You could do it on a computer but it doesn’t have that element of a mistake. The mistakes look quite beautiful with the hand. ‘I first made them in 2010,’ says Khan, pausing slightly. ‘It was a bad year. I lost my mother, she was young, and I lost our first baby eight months into the pregnancy. It was a year of grief. I came into the studio as a way to get rid of these bad feelings. I made these rubber stamps with these words on and I started stamping, creating these forms.’ The original works have a religious undercurrent. Raised a Muslim, Khan stopped practising at 14. ‘I wrote about questioning God’s existence… My father turned to religion because he is Muslim. We found it difficult to practise because we were white – my mother was from Wales – 32 Baku.
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and we couldn’t get to that part of our heritage. I wrote things like, “Why did this happen”, or “My mother died on this day”, then I’d stamp “God is great, Allahu Akbar” on top of it. They held the weight of something awful, but in a way they were such a beautiful thing to look at. ‘They progressed. It didn’t have to be about grief anymore, it was just the way I was creating drawings. It is similar to the way I make photographs, everything is about repetition’ – which is not something that can be said about Khan’s career. Alongside his photography and paintings, he has created video for digital art platform, Sedition. Last year his art appeared in Azerbaijan after he worked on the ‘Merging Bridges’ exhibition – the first to feature British and international artists alongside Azerbaijani artists at Baku’s Museum of Modern Art. ‘It is important for artists to come and create this exchange, to build bridges, as the title suggests,’ he says. ‘I created a sculpture for it that I first made in
Above, from top: ‘Untitled’, Idris Khan (2011), inspired by ‘The Cave’, a multimedia video opera written by American composer Steve Reich in 1993; the artist at work in his studio.
2009 called Quartet for the end of time. It is a steel sculpture I’ve sand-blasted the [eponymous] music of Olivier Messiaen on to. I understood that Azerbaijanis are quite influenced by Western classical music, so I thought it was great to make a link between art lovers and classical music lovers in Azerbaijan.’ Khan’s latest commission is to stage-design a production of The Four Seasons alongside the composer Max Richter in Zurich next year. ‘Richter’s Four Seasons is one of the best pieces of classical music,’ says Khan. ‘We all know Vivaldi’s work, and he just flipped it. It’s like what I would want to do.’ Khan isn’t certain how he will interpret his work to the stage, but he appears quietly, unashamedly confident.
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Courtesy of ViCtoria Miro, London, sean KeLLy, new yorK and yVon LaMbert, Paris.
Sketches.
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photograph of a photograph, rewritten passages of text or sections of sonatas. ‘I’m using them as influences, using their words to inspire my own. ‘I think my work is part of the Post-Modernist movement. I try to create pieces that hold the weight of what preceded them, their cultural background, whether it was the pain or the story of why the work was made. All the layers build up and have a sense of power.’ Trained in photography at the University of Derby, it was during his MA in Fine Art at London’s Royal College of Art, in 2004, that Khan began taking photographs of photographs. ‘The first ones I took were of my own travel photographs. I layered them up and created a composite; a Turner-esque image. My teacher, Paul Kilsby, said, “You’ve hit on something here that needs to be pushed”. ‘From then on, I used more appropriation: work from the Bechers [a series of photos of water and cooling towers taken by Bernd and Hilla Becher since the 1960s], the Qur’an, a philosophy book, anything that influenced me personally. That’s why it isn’t gimmicky. I could choose any book and make an image out of it but these things are more meaningful to me.’ Khan’s stamp pieces are propped up around the studio. ‘They have to be done by hand.
t is a searingly hot day in Macau, the adult playground city off the southern coast of China, and the streets are echoing to the roars of dozens of souped-up supercars racing at full speed; exhausts howling, tyres screaming. A Lamborghini wearing full fighting gear of racing livery nudges past a McLaren. Crowds cheer them on. It sounds like a level in Gran Turismo, the fantasy racing computer game beloved of millions of teenage boys (and their fathers) around the world. But this GT3 race in Macau with its schoolboy pin-up supercars is an annual event – a date in the calendar of the world’s most glamorous racing series. At the end of the race, drivers step out of their cars and peel off their helmets. Handsome young men abound, fitting the image of a racing driver as privileged rake; a daredevil aristocrat in search of expensive thrills in expensive toys, before he settles down. From one of the helmets, however, tumbles an abundance of golden blonde hair. Natalia Freidina smiles for the cameras that have surrounded her Aston Martin DBRS9. It’s just another day’s work in a man’s world for the 34-year-old Russian GT3 racing driver and mother of two, albeit one a long way from her home in Switzerland, and even further, figuratively, from her childhood home in Samara, some 900km from Moscow, in the steppes of central Russia. Freidina is used to it; she has been racing in various types of championship for 34 Baku.
more than a decade, and is now one of the superstars – and sole female driver – on the GT3 circuit, which takes in Baku as one of its spectacular City Challenge races. GT3 racing has been going for seven years – its ever-rising profile attributable, in the past couple of years, to Freidina. As one person involved in the series told me, ‘To have Lamborghini, Ferrari, McLaren, Aston Martin, Porsche and the like build special editions of their fastest cars is a sure way to get the attention of certain types of men. And to have Natalia means we have female interest, too.’ To which one could add, possibly cynically – and the attention of other types of men. Freidina has the perhaps rather antediluvian privilege of being voted one of Russia’s 10 most beautiful women in sport by Russian television channel, Russia 2. GT3 drivers race in hyped-up versions of the same supercars you can see trailing around Knightsbridge, Cannes or Dubai (at much saner speeds) each spring and summer. The cars are built bespoke for GT3 by their manufacturers, adding significant kudos – these are official racers, not ramped-up ‘aftermarket’ efforts. Drivers pay for their own teams and transportation (at a cost of up to half a million euros a year); they recoup costs through elements like sponsorship. I caught up with Freidina a few weeks after the Macau race, at a hotel restaurant in Geneva, where she lives with her Russian husband and her daughters, aged nine and 11. She greets me with a warm smile and a firm handshake. Shall we sit here, I ask? ‘Sure, no problem, wherever you like!’ she replies. Freidina grew up in Samara, ‘a small town on the banks of the river Volga’. Her father worked as an aircraft mechanic, and when she was 10, they moved to Moscow, where she subsequently went to high school and university. Russia, I suggest, is a country that, for all its qualities, is not renowned for offering equality of opportunity for women among traditionally male bastions such as motoring. So how did she…? She smiles, anticipating the question. ‘When I was little I was interested in mechanics,’ she explains. ‘I always played with the boys, not the girls. The other girls played with dolls and clothes, but I wasn’t interested
daddy’s girl
As a little girl growing up in central Russia in Soviet times, Natalia Freidina might not have imagined her life today. Russia’s most famous female racing driver is the hyperglamorous regular on circuits from Macau to Moscow – and soon Baku. Words by darius sanai Photograph by alex const
in clothes or doing my hair. I didn’t get interested in that until much later. ‘From the age of four I used to help my father in the garage. Normally, it’s the son who does this, but my brother wasn’t interested; and I liked to help my father. I learned a lot.’ After they moved to Moscow her father bought a motorbike and she used to help with the maintenance. ‘I loved the technical side, I found it fascinating.’ As a teenager, she got involved more formally in karting races. She wanted to study engineering at university in Moscow, but ‘my father thought that was not interesting or suitable for a girl’, she says, with a hint of a wry smile. ‘So he chose economics as my field of study. Then I worked in that field for just three years, before coming to live in Geneva.’ After her daughters were born, Freidina initially had little spare time to pursue her passion, but she would go rallying in Italy twice a month. ‘Eventually, some friends who live in Milan said I should go into Formula Three [the hardcore precursor to Formula One]. I chose BMW in Formula Three and I went to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia: I had found my calling! I was a test driver for a year, splitting my time between work in KL and home in Geneva. It was hard.’ I wonder what the reaction was to her, in the masculine world of track racing – which is even more extreme than GT3? ‘The first few years were hard,’ she recalls. ‘Some people would say: “Wow, what you’re doing is fantastic.” But others said: “No, a woman should stay at home with the children.” But everybody found it interesting! ‘Now, racing isn’t just my job – it’s my life. The emotions I experience during a race mean I’m already looking forward to 36 Baku.
the next one. I like extremes, but not to put myself in too much danger. I won’t do paragliding and diving, because I think they are more dangerous than racing.’ Freidina’s job is absorbing. Last year she raced in Portugal, Germany, Belgium and France, while she has also competed in Moscow and Kuala Lumpur, and has plans for Baku. She will typically arrive at each location with her team up to a week before each race, to practice and acclimatize. Her racing partner last season was the German aristocrat Albert von Thurn und Taxis; this year, it is Brit Tom Kimber-Smith and fellow Russian Leonid Machitski. Do you need to have money to indulge in her job, I wonder? ‘Yes, mostly it is people who already have money. And who love cars – because it isn’t really a job, it’s a way of life.’
The outlay can be clawed back through advertising and sponsorship deals (hers include Sparco) and, as a Russian blonde, however atypical in character from the clichéd expat ‘Made in Cannes’ wife, Freidina does well through this. She won’t disclose exactly how much she earns, but admits it is enough to make some of the other drivers jealous. ‘At first they were negative. Then they started to understand that, I may be a woman, but I love the sport and it’s my life. Sometimes, before the race, new drivers think I’m a model but afterwards they say, “Yes, you’re a driver”.’ Last year she ranked 17th out of 26 drivers in the FIA GT3 European Championship. ‘There was some jealousy from male drivers about my earning more from sponsorship than them. Before, when I finished races in a lower position it was harder. But now I’m coming second or third regularly, they respect me more. Of course, I want to win and get better every year.’ Freidina has the toned, purposeful physique of a sportswoman. How fit does she have to stay to race?
When i Was little i Was interested in mechanics. i played With the boys, not the girls. the other girls played With dolls and clothes, but i Wasn’t interested in clothes or doing my hair until much later.
my make-up done. After the race I always try and have some sleep because of the adrenaline pumping through me. Then I have to go to a restaurant meal hosted by a sponsor.’ Geneva is one of those cities where playboys (but not, it should be said, playgirls) are frequently seen in the summer months guiding their Lamborghinis and Ferraris through the streets, tunes pouring out of the speakers, engines shouting their presence, gold Rolexes on their wrists, companions du jour in the passenger seat. Does Freidina have a supercar for everyday life, too? ‘No, I have a BMW for everyday life. It’s not super expensive, and I can go to the mountains with my family. For racing I like Lamborghinis.’ Freidina’s daughters accompany her to races during the school holidays, wherever they are in the world. And what about the man who started it all – her father – who sparked little Natalia’s interest in his garage, somewhere in the middle of Russia, in the unutterably different times of the Brezhnevera Soviet Union? ‘My father has gone back to Samara,’ she says, her smile fading. ‘He didn’t like being alone in Geneva when I’m travelling. He is proud of me but he thinks it isn’t right for a woman with children to do this work, with all the travelling. ‘He doesn’t understand. I don’t think he realized, when he was teaching me to work on his motorbike with him when I was little, that I would grow up to do a job like this.’
iVan VdoVin/aaron Foster/GettY. stoYan VasseV.
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‘GT3 isn’t physically demanding at all. For Formula Three, yes: the corners are very hard, the G-force. You have to work hard on fitness. GT3 is different because the cars are road cars with some adjustments.’ So, no special preparations besides keeping generally in shape? ‘I usually travel with the team, about seven or eight of us. But I’m a woman! So I have to go with stylists, make-up assistants, hairdressers. It’s in my sponsorship contract. I may be a driver but I am required to look good, too, when I race. I have to get to the track two hours before [the race], to have
Opposite page, from top: Natalia Freidina behind the wheel of a Spyker at the 2013 Geneva Motor Show; racing in an Audi R8 alongside GT Team Russia team-mate Alexei Vasiliev at Germany’s Nürburgring circuit. Above: gearing up for the Rally Masters Show in Moscow last year. 37 Baku.
smart art
Fashion and art have always been entwined, but now it’s looking like a full-blown affair. The front rows at the shows decamp en masse to the leading art fairs; and the fairs themselves, once redoubts of Bohemian hippy-chic, are becoming fashion shows in their own right. Words by Rebecca Rose
40 Baku.
Opposite page, from left: the Venice Biennale Giardini; Yves Saint Laurent’s Piet Mondrianinspired dress.
wo immaculately dressed female reporters take cover from the rain under the trees in London’s Regent’s Park. They are here for the Frieze Art Fair, but not for the art. Between showers, they dash out to the turnstiles and snap stylish visitors for Britain’s leading fashion magazine. Fast-forward six months to the 55th Venice Biennale – arguably the world’s most prestigious art institution – and, again, fashion is on the radar. Women are navigating the puddled Giardini in Nicholas Kirkwood heels and men are braving the draught in threequarter-length twill trousers. The art world boasts more style-conscious participants than ever before. Fashion as spectacle – self as canvas – has infiltrated exhibition marquees,
become fashionable to be an art collector. People are attracted by the lifestyle – the openings and events – it’s a different social reality. You used to see a lot of Comme des Garçons, Issey Mikaye… adventurous and conceptual designers. Now you see much sexier outfits – [Azzedine] Alaïa, for example, with Birkin bags and so on. That particular sense of style has now blended in with the art world. ‘I love to dress up, whether I’m going to a fancy dinner in Mayfair or a more alternative space in south London. Fashion is about statement and self-expression, having one’s own style and set of rules. I love pieces by Issey Miyake and [Maison] Martin Margiela, as well as personal items that my tailor creates for me: silk shirts in every colour, cut to a pattern originally created for my father. They’re classic and coordinate with everything in my wardrobe. I occasionally wear jewellery but I prefer a cleaner look as it allows the clothes to speak for themselves. Simplicity feels more contemporary. Over the last few years I’ve made strong connections with young designers in London, including Roksanda Ilincic, Peter Pilotto, Mary Katrantzou and Osman Yousefzada – his white T-shirts go with everything.’ Napoleone’s skills in connecting people are responsible for several ventures between up-and-coming designers and artists. She worked on last year’s ‘Britain Creates’, a collusion between fashion and art commissioned by the London 2012 Festival at the Victoria and Albert Museum. This project paired up Peter Pilotto and Francis Upritchard, as well as Jonathan Saunders and Jess Flood-Paddock.
galleries and private views with such fury that the ‘street style’ bloggers and paparazzi hang around hoping to photograph new fashion pioneers. One woman who has witnessed this sea-change first-hand is the London-based art collector Valeria Napoleone, one of Britain’s leading contemporary art buyers, whose eye for art is matched by her fashion nous. ‘The contemporary art world has expanded a lot in the last few years,’ she says. ‘More people are involved and it has
‘I find inspiration everywhere and train my eye to look beyond the art world,’ says Napoleone. ‘Art and fashion have collaborated for many years, but only recently are we seeing it presented in mass culture. The art world has always been relatively isolated. These are two worlds that I particularly connect to, and there are no longer boundaries between them. Creative people connect to creative people.’ Fashion and art have a rich tradition of collaboration. Some of the more recent provocative partnerships have included Vanessa Beecroft and Helmut Lang’s joint performance piece in 2002, where nude female models, save for Lang’s leather
This page, clockwise from top: the gallerist Sadie Coles and the artist John Currin; the designer Delfina Delettrez Fendi’s stylish accessories; the actress Jessica Chastain; the socialite and fashion designer Goga Ashkenazi; the artist Damien Hirst with his girlfriend, the personal stylist Roxie Nafousi; ‘Vogue Italia’ editor-inchief Franca Sozzani. 41 Baku.
Women are navigating the puddled giardini in nicholas KirKWood heels; men are braving the draught in threequarter-length trousers. high-octane art festivals and parties, a cultural landscape where the actor Salma Hayek, the daughter-in-law of über-collector François Pinault, wears floor-length Gucci gowns to dinner. Certain designer labels have strong associations with the art world, and fashion visionaries such as Dries Van Noten have a loyal following. Yet a stroll through the Giardini at this year’s Venice Biennale indicates changing tastes – vintage silk scarves and skin-tight bandage dresses now compete 42 Baku.
This page, clockwise from far left: the actresses Isabelle Adriani and Milla Jovovich; the designer Delfina Delettrez Fendi; the art collector Valeria Napoleone; the French luxury-brand tycoon FrançoisHenri Pinault and his wife, the actress Salma Hayek; the artist Jeremy Deller at the ‘English Magic’ exhibition.
GeTTY. maRGueRiTe m hoRneR. oLYcom sPa/ReX. PhiLiP sinden. siPa PRess/ReX. VenTuReLLi/WiReimaGe.
boots, stood in Jeffrey Deitch’s New York gallery until too tired – the work concluded with the last model sitting down. In the same year, Japanese artist Takashi Murakami began his collaboration with luxury design house Louis Vuitton; his signature ‘super-flat’ aesthetic to the LV monogram was a phenomenal commercial success. One of the first, most iconic, collaborations was in Yves Saint Laurent’s autumn 1965 collection; a shift dress inspired by the colours and lines of Piet Mondrian’s abstract paintings from the 1930s. The right collaborative dynamic can bestow creative cachet on the fashion brand and prove highly lucrative for the artist. Packing a suitcase for the opening week of the Venice Biennale requires a little more consideration than a casual trip to Italy. Venice is the home of
alongside androgynous trouser suits. One constant is Prada – the perennial black suit styled with an edgy flourish: Perspex specs for men, matt-red lips for women. Art can feel tribal, especially at events on this scale. Distinguished-looking, older gentlemen in horn-rimmed glasses and cashmere sweaters; collectors with neon dyed hair, gallerists in Nehru jackets and artists with gravity-defying moustaches – the categories seem infinite. The Fifth Element-inspired staff uniforms at hipster hangout Palazzo Peckham were designed by the New York duo Eckhaus Latta. Style as a diffusion of art is everywhere. For the gallerist Hannah Watson, a capsule wardrobe for the Biennale involves practicality: ‘It’s often hot and can also be wet, so I work my clothes around that. Wedge shoes are ideal for all those bridges. I don’t go for the pristine look, my style is more kooky. I call it Italian-granny chic. Whenever I visit Venice I go to a charity shop the size of a cupboard near the Arsenale. Everything is €1 – all good quality and well made; leather shoes that last forever, and some amazing handbags. For
night, my look is quite tomboyish. I’ll wear shorts with a cropped jacket – not exactly masculine but certainly not girly. A mixture of the practical with the glamorous.’ Watson hosted events at the opening week of the Biennale, including a book launch at La Serra. The chosen outfit was a block monochrome print dress, and later in the week she hosted a party in a tailored white suit; not by Stella McCartney, but from her favourite charity shop behind San Marco. For those art professionals who are visiting the Biennale with clients, a slightly different approach is required. Elegant, understated ensembles ensure art remains the focus of their encounter. Suad Garayeva, a curator at Sotheby’s, helps collectors navigate myriad pavilions at the Biennale. Over lunch at the Sotheby’s boat, moored close to the Giardini entrance, Garayeva says she prefers cutting-edge boutiques such as London’s Wolf & Badger. ‘I don’t have time to trawl the shops so it is important to find a boutique that connects with my sense of style. It’s more efficient.’ Clothing is only one part of the process – Garayeva’s manicured nails and classic
This page, clockwise from top right: the photographer Micol Sabbadini; ‘The Garbage Patch State’ installation, Maria Cristina Finucci; the artist Rachel Feinstein; the artist Anish Kapoor and guest; the fashion designer Miuccia Prada.
jewellery give an immaculate polish to her look. After a morning spent interviewing a hungover artist wearing mismatched socks, her sophisticated sense of style, to me, seems dazzling. And what of the artists? Sartorial style is unlikely to be a priority. ‘Artists tend to be more scruffy,’ says Watson. ‘I think they save that kind of energy for their work. Sarah Lucas is quite casual in her style, but her work is some of the most interesting to look at. I don’t think artists ask to be observed in that way.’ For Valeria Napoleone, the way artists dress can hold a certain fascination. ‘They go beyond fashion,’ she says. ‘Some artists are more visible than others in the way they present themselves at gallery openings, for example. [Polish installation artist] Goshka Macuga has her own style, her own set of rules for aesthetics. I love the way she pulls a look together.’ On a terrace overlooking the Grand Canal at the Baku party, artists mingled with designers, entrepreneurs and collectors. Among the stylish guests, one woman cut a particular dash – the Brazilian fashion designer, Gilda Midani, wearing one of her own creations. As she leaned on the marble balustrade and gazed across the canal at Santa Maria della Salute, a photographer approached to request her picture. Art is the spectacle at the Biennale, but the evenings draw its most stylish visitors to centre stage.
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43 Baku.
This page, clockwise from top left: ‘Factory of the Wind’, Altai Sadiqzadeh; ‘An Innocent Meteorology’, Aga Ousseinov; the museum entrance sign. Opposite page: ‘Travelers of Winds’, Sadiqzadeh. All works 2012.
44 Baku.
TWISTED
Metal One man’s junk is another man’s muse. The AzMeCo methanol factory in the Garadagh region, outside baku, stages a new open-air museum where scrap metal rises, like a phoenix from the skip, as art. ‘The Territory of the Wind’ collection showcases 17 WORKS INCLUDING this grandiose pink coach by founder artist, Altai Sadiqzadeh. Photographs by Fakhriyya Mammadova
This page, clockwise, from top: ‘Flying Machine’, Eldar Mammadov; ‘An Infinity Path’, Altai Sadiqzadeh; ‘Observer of the Secret Winds’, Mammadov. Opposite page, from top left: ‘Factory of the Wind’ (and right); ‘Methanol’, both Sadiqzadeh. All works 2012.
46 Baku.
The cenTral sculpTure ‘FacTory oF The Wind’ (opposiTe Top) evokes The planT – a venue ThaT shoWs aZerBaiJani arT is alive and cuTTingedge ouTside The capiTal. iT May Be MeTal. iT is MosT cerTainly hoT.
47 Baku.
Jazz queen
Born in Baku, based in Germany, performing globally, Aziza Mustafa Zadeh is Azerbaijan’s female jazz phenomenon. She tells the tale of her colourful life, riven with inspiration and tragedy, and her pride in bringing her country’s culture to the world.
I 48 Baku.
Words by James Lachno Photographs by thomas Lohr Styling by meLIna nIcoLaIDe
will never forget one fan who wrote to me,’ says Aziza Mustafa Zadeh, her voice hushed. ‘He was in a wheelchair, and he said he listened to my music and he started to walk.’ The 43-year-old Azerbaijani jazz star is telling me about the proudest moment of her career. It isn’t the 15 million albums she has sold worldwide. It’s not that she has wowed audiences from London to Washington DC, Montreal to Istanbul. Nor is it the prestigious German Phono Academy Prize, honouring
outstanding classical music, that she won in 1994. It’s not even that her virtuoso piano playing and otherworldly voice have earned her the moniker, ‘Princess of Jazz’. She would sooner be the Mother Teresa of Jazz, for what really delights Mustafa Zadeh is the power of her music to help people. ‘Every human being is born with a mission,’ she says. ‘My mission is music. I would have been glad to be a doctor, but it’s great to make people feel happy and to help them with music. This is the greatest joy. It’s not comparable as an award to any piece of metal.’ We meet at the Frankfurter Hof, a creative hub for the Arts in Mainz, west Germany – Mustafa Zadeh’s adopted home. The city is bathed in sunlight, and with its cobbled streets and ornate historical towers it could
pass for her original home, the Icheri Sheher – or Old Town – of Baku. ‘I chose Mainz because it is a sister city of Baku,’ she says. ‘It has a lot of good spirit. Of course, I miss Baku and sometimes it is heartbreaking. But Mainz, with its atmosphere, helps me to fight with my nostalgia.’ Casually dressed in loose grey trousers, a stripy cream blouse and sunhat, with her almost-black hair carefully centre parted and tied behind her head, Mustafa Zadeh looks less glamorous than the portraits of the Princess of Jazz from the 1990s. Yet she still carries a certain regal grace, be it through the ageless, pristine beauty of her lineless face or her benevolent nature. She is a woman of strong convictions, and throughout our conversation she sits upright, with her hands clasped, but for occasional outbursts of passion when she beams and gesticulates. One such is when she recalls her formative years in Baku. ‘It was a very exciting time for me,’ she says. ‘Home was home, and at the same time it was a practice room where musicians came. I was born into jazz – that was fantastic.’ Mustafa Zadeh comes from exceptional musical stock. Her mother, Eliza Khanom, is a classically trained Georgian singer, and her father was the legendary Azerbaijani pianist and composer Vagif Mustafa Zadeh – a man who pioneered the fusion of jazz with traditional Azerbaijani folk music called mugham, and about whom BB King once remarked: ‘People call me the king
Previous page. Dress by Gucci. This page. Jumper by Pleats Please. Rings by Balenciaga. Opposite. Jacket by Marni. Culottes by Hussein Chalayan. Rings by Balenciaga.
of the blues, but if I could play the piano like you do, I would call myself God’. It made for an unconventional upbringing. ‘It was interesting to be in contact with father and mother’s friends. There was a good understanding between us; we used to discuss architecture, art, composers, poets,’ she says. Her first experience on stage was performing with her father, when she was three. She later studied at the Baku Conservatoire, although she says she wasn’t a committed student. ‘It was all classical training. When you have a gift from God all you have to do is listen. When you’re able to listen to the best of the best – in classical, jazz – then you will find yourself.’ The young Mustafa Zadeh immersed herself in the music her parents enjoyed, from classical giants such as Puccini and Mahler to jazz greats like Miles Davis. Through her father’s playing, she also developed a love for the artful, trance-like moods of mugham, with its complex system of scales and improvizational technique. ‘Mugham is more than music; it’s a dialogue about love – to God, your parents, family, your children, life. I always say mugham is a labyrinth: it has a way in but no way out, in a good way. It charms and captures you.’ These early years were the happiest of her life, she says. But shortly before Mustafa Zadeh’s 10th birthday, tragedy struck. In December 1979, after a concert in Tashkent, now the capital of Uzbekistan, her father collapsed and died from a heart attack. He was only 39. Mustafa Zadeh becomes almost tearful as she remembers the last time she spoke to him. ‘I said, “Papa will you come to my birthday?” He said, “Yes, in two days I’m back home.” I said, “I don’t believe you” – and it was true.’ She is certain she had had a premonition that her father would not return from the tour. ‘A big mirror had broken in a bathroom in my dream. I knew I wouldn’t see my father ever again. It was so strong and realistic, but I was a child. I didn’t tell anyone because I couldn’t stop it. It was his destiny.’ It would sound far-fetched, a rose-tinted memory, but for the sincerity of Mustafa Zadeh’s unflinching, coffee-coloured stare. She talks with immense pride and a tangible sorrow about her late father. Even now, his memory permeates everything she does. Her musical style, though more classically rooted, has the dauntless improvizational bent of her father’s, and integrates mugham modes, too. Later, she would dedicate several songs to his memory – from the exultant ‘Vagif’ on her 1993 album Always, to the mournful ‘Father’ from 1995’s Dance of Fire – and she titled her 1997 album Jazziza after the name he used to call her as a child. Her father’s early death has galvanized a caring streak in her, a will (maybe even a need) to help others – whether in everyday life (she patiently marshals my stuttering attempt to greet her in German, and asks several times if I’ve enough to drink), or through her music. Mustafa Zadeh’s own pain, she says, has been an inspiration. ‘We used to say, “With time, all pain goes down”, but not in this case. Even now, I do everything for the memory of my father.’ This stiffened her resolve to leave her own stamp on the music world, and by the
late 1980s she was being recognized as a prodigious jazz talent. In 1988 she was invited to the Thelonious Monk piano competition in Washington DC. She brightens as she revisits this ‘special story’. ‘It was such trouble to fly, because of visas and passports... and I was late, so the driver called the competition [organizers] to ask them to move me to an hour later,’ she recalls. ‘After the 10-hour flight and the car journey, I only had five minutes to warm up and take the stage.’ It is testament to Mustafa Zadeh’s outstanding ability and plucky self-belief that she came third in the competition. From there, her career took off. She was signed to Columbia records, which released her eponymous debut album in 1991, and she began touring the world. Around this time, Mustafa Zadeh also relocated to Germany with her mother – a move she saw as
EvEry human bEing is born with a mission – minE is music. i would havE bEEn glad to bE a doctor, but it’s rEally grEat to makE pEoplE fEEl happy and to hElp thEm with music.
51 Baku.
necessary to bring Azerbaijani culture to a wider audience. ‘It was impossible to stay in Baku, because for each concert you have to fly five, six, seven or more hours. To do something for my land I had to move.’ Although she doesn’t say it directly, I suspect the relocation also had something to do with the ill treatment her father had suffered as a jazz musician under Soviet rule. She talks of ‘pressure and misunderstanding’ from the ‘regime’ that stood in the way of his career, such as the times he would be ready to fly abroad for concerts but be called back at the last moment. ‘The people who used to decide the destinies of musicians had no idea what jazz was,’ she says, pointedly. By the time that Azerbaijan gained independence, in 1991, after 71 years of direction from Moscow, Mustafa Zadeh had moved to Mainz. But she has no regrets. ‘My father is happy, looking down and saying, “You are doing the things I wanted to [do], you’re doing it for me”.’ Although she returns to Baku several times a year to visit her father’s grave – and ‘drink in the aroma of the oil and fig trees’, she says, lustily inhaling – in terms of her career Mustafa Zadeh hasn’t looked back. Her nine acclaimed albums showcase a bewitching, octave-scaling voice, and spry, fluid piano playing that has been compared to that of Miles Davis’ band mate, Keith Jarrett. She has performed with jazz greats such as the pianist Bill Evans and harmonica player Toots Thielemans; scooped awards including the Sony Echo Prize, and still preserved the spirit of her roots, by the delicate fusion of mugham into her work. If she wanted to make her father – and her nation – proud, Mustafa Zadeh has surely succeeded. The deep affection and unshakeable bond between her and her home fans was manifest at her last performance there, when she triumphantly closed the 2007 Baku Jazz Festival. ‘I felt in my gut it would either be a fantastic concert or I would collapse on stage,’ she says. ‘It was a very long concert, three hours. People didn’t let me go, and I didn’t want to. It was emotional, incredible, unforgettable.’ This was also the year Mustafa Zadeh released her most recent album, Contrasts II. She is always writing music, she tells me, but since 2009 has performed only sporadically. How long, I wonder, until the Princess of Jazz returns to tour? ‘When I give a concert, I give all of me,’ she says. ‘Then I’m half dead.’ Her eyes look down as she again seems to summon the memory of her father. Perhaps she doesn’t want to burn out as he so tragically did. ‘I’m always collecting impressions and inspirations from life, but I need time to breathe.’ She pauses, and grins. ‘Then I’ll be back like a tornado.’
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52 Baku.
PhotograPher’s assIstant. Per schorn. styLIst’s assIstant. ghyLes ouahmeD. haIr. angeLos Pattas. make-uP. thomas De kLuyver. James Lachno wrItes for the DaILy teLegraPh.
mugham music is a dialoguE about lovE. it is a labyrinth, with a way in but no way out, in a good way. it charms and capturEs you.
oPPosIte toP. Jumpsuit by PLeats PLease. Shoes by PraDa. oPPosIte BeLow. Top by maIson martIn margIeLa. Trousers by PLeats PLease. Necklace by aesa. thIs Page. Jacket by husseIn chaLayan.
This page: Ryan Doyle flips against a backdrop of the Flame Towers. Opposite page: leaping across the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre.
54 Baku.
Sky High Blink and you might have missed the freerunning whirlwind that is Ryan Doyle on the streets of Baku earlier this year. Britain’s most famous parkour athlete was seen running, flipping, jumping and somersaulting his way across, through and over the capital’s most eye-popping landmarks, including the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre, Shirvanshah’s Palace, oil fields and rooftops of the Old Town. as part of the red bullsponsored event, doyle met local parkour performers who introduced him to their urban playground. Photographs by Samo Vidic
This page, from top: scoping the Old Town for suitable locations; among the oil fields outside the city. Opposite page: in action above the Shirvanshah’s Palace.
56 Baku.
when you perform, you zone out; you switch off. it’s just you, the environment and the emotion driving the performance. when you take off and flip through the air, in that split-second of flying time, you put a little smile on your face, knowing that you’re gonna land and Be safe. it’s a great feeling.
When I’m surrounded by different shapes and obstacles, my brain changes the way I see them, so it’s not obstacles in front of me, it’s apparatus – it’s a playground. Baku offers a lot of cool, little parkour hotspots and challenges. Ryan doyle.
hail to the
enfant
terrible
Is Steve Lazarides turning the art establishment upside down, or is he part of a new art ruling class? Either way, London’s leading alternative art dealer has plenty to say about Banksy, Brad Pitt and Baku. Words by JAMES MULLINGER Photographs by dANIEL StIER
teve Lazarides is arguably the busiest man in British contemporary art right now. With three galleries in London and Newcastle, the 44-year-old Bristol lad and former enfant terrible, who made millionaires of a generation of street artists, is preparing not one but two new exhibitions this month. London’s Soho sees the launch of Cleon Peterson’s works of nightmarish tableaus and the Newcastle gallery will show Darren Coffield’s incendiary paintings of the miners’ strike. Despite regularly working 20-hour days, Lazarides beams a healthy glow befitting a man who travels globally every week. From exploring new markets (including Baku last year) to discovering young artists, he is at the top of the ladder. But he has no idea how he got there. Lazarides describes himself on Twitter as an ‘accidental art dealer’ which, given that his relationship with the artist Banksy began through a love of his work rather than any grand plan, is true. He also labels himself a ‘general miserable bastard’– categorically untrue. 58 Baku.
Reclining in his office chair, at his Fitzrovia gallery space in London, he talks at a breakneck speed while gesticulating manically. ‘I get bored very easily so I love to travel to become inspired,’ he says. ‘No one ever discovered anything new by sitting still. When I visited Baku last year I was incredibly impressed. What a place! To see the amazing architecture that is appearing so rapidly is really exciting.’ So can we expect a Lazarides show in Baku soon? ‘I’d truly love to do a show there,’ he admits. ‘The artists of Azerbaijan have a lot to offer. I’m looking to spread things around the world and put on at least four shows a year that are outside of the gallery system. But also I want to use it as a vehicle to pick up artists from those other areas, almost using it as a cultural conduit to take a western art form to places that won’t necessarily have seen it in the flesh.’ Lazarides is proud to be bringing art to the masses. Sure, the work of his first client, Banksy, changes hands for up to £1million, but he stocks works from as little as £100. But with a chain of galleries, British artist Jonathan Yeo on his books and a profile as big as his clients’, is he in danger of becoming ‘establishment’? ‘I’m not sure the establishment thinks I’m part of the establishment,’ he laughs. ‘If I am, great, it doesn’t bother me. You can’t rage against the machine forever. You can still do things your own way, but it would be
Steve Lazarides, photographed at his Fitzrovia, London gallery.
ludicrous to sit here in this Georgian townhouse, 100 metres from Oxford Street, and say, “We’re still cutting-edge, underground”. It’s blatantly not true. I like to think the general population accepted us, then the establishment followed suit.’ Lazarides had been working as a picture editor on Sleaze Nation magazine during the mid-1990s when he was commissioned to photograph a socio-political graffiti artist emerging on the Bristol scene – who went by the name of Banksy. The artist gave Lazarides some prints to flog, which he did. When he launched
says Lazarides. ‘But they just like it. It isn’t as if they needed 57 art advisers to tell them it was OK to buy it. Brad Pitt wasn’t buying because he saw it in Art Review. He saw it, liked it, and bought it. End of story.’ John Cusack, Christina Aguilera and Angelina Jolie are also followers of Lazarides, and Jude Law is a close friend and customer. ‘I met him about eight years ago,’ says Law. ‘It was a different sort of art show, really ramshackle; paintings pinned to the walls, sitting on the floor – really an underground experience, like nothing I’d ever seen before. Steve is a bit of an event in himself, and his openings are the same.’ None of this, however, was part of the plan for Lazarides.‘It was pure and utter chance that any of this happened,’ he says. ‘We never went into it to make money. We
God-given talent. I was recently looking after Johnny’s wildly leftfield porn collages and the show he just did on plastic surgery. We’ve got a very friendly relationship, and sometimes our powers converge for us to do a completely lunatic show. A lot of people told him it would be suicide to do the porn collages, and I said: “Do you know what? This will go viral”, which is exactly what it did… He’s got his National Portrait Gallery show later this year; he’s going to be a significant artist of this generation.’ Yeo – like Banksy – has an undeniably vast personal wealth. But Lazarides resents the idea that an artist making money is somehow selling out. ‘It’s not a sell-out. If they weren’t allowed to sell art, then the only people who would be able to afford to make it would be the independently wealthy, and surely that would make the scene much worse than it is… People think you are only an artist if you can’t afford to eat. It’s a romantic notion. It’s really very difficult for people to concentrate if they can’t eat.’ For his part, Yeo feels that Lazarides is utterly unique in his outlook and work ethic. ‘Steve is fearless,’ he told Baku. ‘I started working with him when I did the collages; when the other galleries I was working with didn’t want anything to do with them. The art world is surprisingly risk-averse. Given that it pretends to be so cutting-edge and experimental, mostly it sticks to its own rules and formulas. Genuine risk takers and innovators, like Steve, are relatively few and far between.’ Walking around Lazarides’ cavernous space, with walls adorned by framed works alongside pieces sprayed and painted on to
never set out to break all the rules; we didn’t know what they were in the first place. The art world told us it’s impossible, it will never work. Well, we just did it. Oh yeah, and we did it again. Yeah, and again! People are caught up in the way things should be done, how you have to behave… For something that’s supposed to be the contemporary art world, it’s awfully stuffy.’ Lazarides has now parted company with Banksy but remains close friends with Jonathan Yeo. ‘I genuinely think that Johnny will be one of the most important painters of his generation,’ he says. ‘He has got
the walls themselves, the ‘accidental art dealer’ oozes the excitement of a man who cannot believe he is paid to do what he is passionate about. So what’s next for Lazarides and The Outsiders? ‘I’ll continue to do what interests me,’ he says. ‘Artists like JR, Vhils and Conor Harrington never fail to amaze me. It’s basically about what’s pushing the boundaries of what’s capable or possible.’ ‘I would love to do a show in Baku,’ he reveals. ‘If someone wants to offer us a show there, then I’ll make it happen. Give us some space, and we will come and make it
This page, clockwise from right: Lazarides’ studio; ‘Sweeping It Under The Carpet’, Banksy (2006); ‘Reduction Rhinoplasty’, Jonathan Yeo (2011).
the publisher Pictures On Walls in 1999 you could pick up a Banksy for the price of supper. Over time, the artworks garnered tremendous popular interest, coming to be worth millions on the world stage. ‘Outsider Art’ appeared at Christie’s and Sotheby’s – auction houses traditionally associated with fine art – and was sold as part of the Urban Art movement. Lazarides hates that phrase, preferring Outsider Art for its wider default parameters. Ultimately, the figures and branding are irrelevant to him. He believes the works should not be treated as investments, destined to live in storage until sold, but would rather they are hung on walls in homes, appreciated. ‘People get really upset that we’re selling to movie stars,’ 60 Baku.
ALExANdRE FARto. GEttY. IAN Cox. PEtER MALLEt. RIChARd VALENCIA.
This page, clockwise from left: Lazarides at his London gallery; ‘Gangsta Rat’, Banksy (2004); ‘Modern Monarchy’, Conor Harrington (2011); ‘Visual Consumption 6’, Vhils (2010). look crazy. I thought what they were trying to do [when I was there] was interesting. I love seeing things emerging from under a shadow, trying to do new things. Two of the most interesting lads I saw in Moscow recently, including [graffiti artist] Misha Most, had gone and done a show in Baku [in 2010 at contemporary art gallery, Kiçik QalArt]. So they clearly know what they are doing. In Baku they seem to have an open-minded attitude to put other stuff on, where it doesn’t seem to be just art by numbers. It’s not, “Let’s just have the latest Damien”, or “Let’s do a Murakami
exhibition” – they are trying to do stuff that fits with their generation.’ Because he never set out to be this successful, Lazarides feels he is still able to take risks. But does it continue to excite him? ‘Yeah, if it’s a good piece and makes me smile. I love the fact that these artists are going out and using the street as a canvas to make the world a better place.’ And with that he rushes off down the stairs to meet a new artist – possibly the next Banksy or Jonathan Yeo – enthusing and laughing manically, with his scarf trailing wildly behind him.
We NeVer WeNt iNto it to MaKe MoNeY. We NeVer Set oUt to breaK the rUleS, We DiDN’t KNoW What theY Were iN the FirSt PlaCe.
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Horizons The spectacular Baku skyline is our inspiration for summer. Build your wardrobe around structured shapes, sheer textures and sharp curves for cutting-edge city style. Photographs by CARLOTTA MANAIGO Styling by MeLINA NICOLAIde
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Sunglasses by CHRISTIAN DIOR.
Bodice by MAISON MARTIN MARGIELA. Skirt by SPORTMAX. Shoes by HUSSEIN CHALAYAN. Necklace by LANVIN. Photographed on the roof of the JW MARRIOTT.
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Top VANESSA Thisbypage. Shirt BRUNO. by JACQUEMUS. Skirt, trousers and shoes by Skirt by RICHARD NICOLL. LOUIS VUITTON.CHALAYAN. Hat by HUSSEIN Necklace by MISSONI. Bracelet (just seen) by MIU MIU. Photographed at the Carpet Museum. Opposite. Top and skirt by DOLCE & GABBANA. Hat by HUSSEIN CHALAYAN.
67 Baku.
68 Baku.
Top by VANESSA BRUNO. Skirt, trousers and shoes by LOUIS VUITTON.
Opposite. Dress by THEYSKENS’ THEORY. Visor by HOUSE OF FLORA. Shoes by CALVIN KLEIN. Photographed at the Park Bulvar. This page. Visor, as before.
Corset by BURBERRY. Necklace by MISSONI. Photographed at Mini VENICE.
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Top by VANESSA BRUNO. Skirt, trousers and shoes by LOUIS Opposite. Top, skirt and shoesVUITTON. by PRADA. Photographed at the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre. This page. Top and skirt by CHANEL. Photographed at the Flame Towers.
Dress by BLUMARINE. Necklace by LANVIN. Photographed at the mugham centre.
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This page. Top by CHRISTopher kane. Skirt by Versus. Head net by CHRISTIAN DIOR. Photographed at the BOULEVARD. opposite. Corset by KOSTAS MURKUDIS ARCHIVE. Trousers by HAIDER ACKERMANN. Visor by HOUSE OF FLORA. Photographed at the Gunash RESTAURANT.
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78 Baku.
Opposite. Body, stylist’s own. Skirt by LANVIN. Shoes by HUSSEIN CHALAYAN. Sunglasses by CHRISTIAN DIOR. Photographed at the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre. This page. Top by KOSTAS MURKUDIS. Skirt by MIU MIU. Belt by CHRISTOS KYRIAKIDES. Sunglasses by CHRISTIAN DIOR. Model WERONIKA DUS at IMG. Photographer’s assistant EDWARD SCHELLER. Stylist’s assistant NURA MUXTAROVA. Hair ANGELOS PATTAS at BLOW CY. Make-up MORGANE MARTINi at ARTLIST.
This page: Michelangelo Pistoletto. Opposite page: ‘Venus of the Rags’, Pistoletto (1967-1974).
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the artist is infinite
Michelangelo Pistoletto was one of the defining figures in European art in the last century. Now he is back, collaborating with everyone from the Louvre to fashion houses, to spread his profound messages. Words by CLAIRE WRATHALL Illustration by kARIn kELLnER
eading to Paris this summer? The Louvre is, as always, worth your attention. A huge emblem on the west-facing facet of the IM Pei glass pyramid that covers the main entrance will surely catch your eye: an infinity symbol consisting of three interconnected loops of polished stainless steel. Never before has a work of art been commissioned for display here. But the choice of location – which looks towards the distant business district of La Défense – is deliberate. For the work is intended in part as a warning against the follies of excess that led to the global financial crisis. At its unveiling this spring, its designer, Michelangelo Pistoletto – the great octogenarian Italian conceptualist, revered as one of the most important European artists of the second half of the 20th century – said, ‘Politicians should look at themselves in the mirror and learn to take responsibility for this terrible mess, and think of the infinite future ahead for humanity.’ A further 17 installations by Pistoletto are on show across four sections of the museum – in the galleries of Italian paintings, classical antiquities and medieval art, and among the French sculptures in the Cour Marly. Close to the Mona Lisa in the Grande Galerie, there is a work entitled Girl Taking a Photograph (19622007), a mirror in which appears to be reflected a tourist holding her camera aloft. ‘There’s always someone making a photo there,’ he tells me. ‘I’m poking fun at them, trying to say that people no longer look with their eyes any more. They just consume and take pictures of things that are famous. I’m making a connection between the past and today, and trying to make people think.’ In the Galerie Daru, a statue of Venus stands before a pile of rags; Venus of the Rags was made in 1967 to comment on the dangers of 81 Baku.
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consumerism, and the extent to which nature and beauty are being subsumed by rubbish. No danger then of forgetting that Pistoletto was a pioneer of Arte Povera, a term coined in 1967 for a loosely connected group of artists intent on using found objects, industrial scrap and natural materials as media to make statements about what the Louvre catalogue calls ‘problems linked to consumerism’. Along with contemporaries such as Pino Pascali, Luciano Fabro, Gilberto Zorio and Jannis Kounellis, Pistoletto rejected the prevailing art movements of the time: Abstraction, Minimalism and, in particular, Pop Art. ‘Arte Povera took a totally different position from Pop Art, which was a celebration of the consumerist system,’ he says. ‘It saw the future as something empty, something to be filled with acquisitions, whereas Arte Povera was about acquiring knowledge and accepting responsibility. Pop Art wanted to emphasise the superfluous; we wanted to get rid of it.’ Povera in this context, he explains, means not poor, ‘but simple and useful’. So it’s surprising to find Pistoletto at London’s Royal Opera House, one spring evening, among a crowd of 300 distinguished guests, at the invitation of Marquis Ferdinando
Pistoletto is sporting a black jersey under the black jacket he habitually wears, along with a jaunty panama hat. Later, nine lots of Ornellaia wines will be auctioned by Sotheby’s in aid of the Royal Opera House Foundation. (‘Opera is very Italian, like myself and the wine,’ says the artist.) And an £80,000 bid will be made for a salmanazar (nine-litre bottle) of Ornellaia 2010 in a one-off demijohn designed by Pistoletto for the estate’s 25th anniversary. It all feels a long way from Cittadellarte, the ‘social utility’, ‘great laboratory’ and art school he founded in 1998 in a former wool mill in Biella – the Piedmont town where he was born in 1933 – to ‘produce a change in society through ideas’ and manifest ‘a responsible transformation of global society’. So how does consorting with the one per cent square with his idealism? ‘I never speak about politics,’ he says
Frescobaldi – chairman of the revered Tuscan wine maker Ornellaia – and its CEO, Giovanni Geddes da Filicaja, for a stupendous gala of opera, fine food (foie gras and wild mushrooms, followed by filet de boeuf and asparagus) and six complex, and very expensive, wines. The dress code is black tie but, ever the dissenter,
with mirrors, the idea is to implicate the viewer in the picture and erode the border between life, reality, art and artifice.
This page, clockwise from above: Pistoletto with ‘The Fall’ (1983-91) in Italy; ‘The Etruscan’ (1976); the infinity sign on the IM Pei pyramid at the Louvre.
This page, clockwise from top: Pistoletto’s work is on display at the Louvre until 2 September; ‘Obelisk and Third Paradise’ (1976-2013); ‘Sacred Conversation: Anselmo, Zorio, Penone’ (1962-74), both by the artist. pragmatically, his manner at once wise, patriarchal and charmingly avuncular. ‘Politics is simplistic. We have problems in the world today, but I’m not here to represent the drama of those problems or even criticise them. My aim is to try to make people think and maybe see a new direction.’ Pistoletto has produced livery – the term label doesn’t come close to describing what he has created – for three different large-capacity bottles for the 2010 vintage, dubbed La Celebrazione, an interpretation of a classic Bordeaux, blending cabernet sauvignon with merlot, cabernet franc and petit verdot. It is, he says, a wine he has enjoyed. (And no wonder: Ornellaia wines – which are now available at Baku’s top hotels, bars and restaurants including the Four Seasons, Buta Palace and Nar Sharab – are among the most sought after of the so-called ‘superTuscans’.) ‘I like the wine, I like the people, and it was very good to meet with them,’ he enthuses. Wine, he believes, is life-enhancing, just as art is. ‘Of course, you can live off
water and bread alone, but wine is nourishing, too,’ he says. ‘It feeds the mind, and many artists have found a source of inspiration in wine because of the way it can propel the mind towards imagination, fantasy. Towards truth, too. In vino truly is veritas. It may not be useful or have a practical function, and you should not exaggerate its benefits. You should not drink too much, just as you should not eat too much. But, like art, it’s important for the spirit. And it provides such pleasure!’ It is no coincidence, he adds, that ‘spirito’ is another word for alcohol in Italian. Mirrors play a key role in Pistoletto’s art, not least for their quality as devices that ‘express truth and stimulate imagination’. The idea of using them came to him, he says, as ‘the result of a series of self-portraits I’d been working on in order to explore my identity. When you make a self-portrait, you have to look at yourself in the mirror in order to reproduce yourself.’ At first he ‘never thought about the mirror itself’, but over time 83 Baku.
i’m not here to represent the drama of the world’s problems. my aim is to try to make people think and maybe see a new direction.
he saw it ‘as a protagonist in the work, just as much as I was’. He battled with the idea of how to reproduce this until ‘finally I found my identity’ when he decided to make his paintings directly onto sheets of polished stainless steel, so ‘the mirror became the canvas itself’. This body of work, now known as his Mirror Paintings, dates from the early 1960s and uses figurative images traced from photographs onto tissue paper then, almost hyper-realistically, painted in and affixed to sheets of mirror-finish stainless steel. (In earlier versions, Pistoletto used gilt or silvered grounds, heavily varnished to make them reflective. In later works, 84 Baku.
Below: Pistoletto at his exhibition, ‘Year 1: Earthly Paradise’, at the Louvre in Paris this year. Bottom right: the artist’s ‘Twentytwo Less Two Performance’ at the Italian Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale.
the images were printed onto the steel by silk-screen and sold in editions of up to 200.) The idea, he says, is to ‘implicate the viewer in the picture’ by making them appear in it, too, thereby blurring and confusing, even ‘eroding the border between life, reality, art and artifice’. The results were original, thoughtprovoking, oddly beautiful and have become highly desirable. The day we meet, one work, Ragazzo (1965), sold at Christie’s New York for $1.14m. And in February, a self-portrait of the artist from 1962 – in which, dressed in a suit and tie, he sits astride a wooden chair, looking directly at the viewer – fetched almost $2m, more than six times its lower estimate and a new world record for the artist. ‘It’s a fantastic piece,’ said dealer Daniella Luxembourg, one under-bidder whose London gallery, Luxembourg & Dayan, recently held a solo show of his entitled ‘Pistoletto Politico’.
Here, several of the works featured mirrors. Mobili capovolti (1976), for example, is an upturned leather armchair with a mirror affixed to its underside so one’s attention is drawn to what is usually hidden. In seeing oneself in it, the viewer becomes part of it. Does it symbolise a longing to overturn the status quo? Or the status quo overturned – and, if so, what is the individual’s role in this? Pistoletto smiles enigmatically. In The Cage (1962-73), prison bars have been screen-printed on to a panel of mirror so the viewer becomes at once both prisoner and guard. While Division and Multiplication of the Mirror (1978) consists of a bisected, gilt-frame mirror, with its two halves hung on adjacent walls so that viewers see endless, increasingly fragmented, reflections of themselves. It is tempting to think that Pistoletto’s interest in mirrors and reflection was
AnToInE MongodIn. AP. CITTAdELLARTE-fondAzIonE PIsToLETTo, bIELLA. CoRbIs. gETTY. WIREIMAgE.
influenced by the fact that his father, also an artist, worked as a restorer of, in particular, icons with their golden or metallic backgrounds. But he avers. ‘The icon is a religious subject; it represents humanity, divinity and infinity. But the gold ground of an icon doesn’t provide any answers.’ It’s purely decorative, he explains, just there to reflect the light and add ‘glamour’. By contrast an actual mirror ‘provides answers. It reflects the universe; all society is there. It gives the work a reality’. His parents, however, played an important role in his becoming an artist. ‘My father showed me the way through his painting. He taught me about the history of art in a very practical way, not just through books but also physically,’ recalls Pistoletto. But their tastes diverged. His father’s style was ‘very classical, very realistic. He didn’t like modern art’. Whereas Pistoletto admired American Action painters, as well as Italians such as ‘[Lucio] Fontana, [Alberto] Burri, and I also liked very much [Giuseppe] Capogrossi because his approach to abstraction was pure’. He didn’t ‘want to follow what my father was doing’, so instead his mother enrolled him at the Armando Testa school in Turin: not just ‘the best graphic designer in Italy’ but founder of the advertising agency that still
Above: ‘Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One To Many, 1956-74’ (2011) at the Maxxi Museum, Rome, Italy. Left: ‘The Cage’ (1962-73).
bears his name, and another fertile training ground where Pistoletto thrived. ‘In advertising then it was considered necessary to know about art in order to develop good ideas for publicity,’ he says. Perhaps it was this early merging of art with commerce that opened Pistoletto’s mind to the benefits of collaborating with Italian brands he respects. He has, to date, lent his name not just to Ornellaia, but Illy coffee (for which he designed packaging and espresso cups), and fashion label Ermenegildo Zegna, at whose Milan headquarters stands what looks like a giant, 4m-high felt baseball, created by Pistoletto from wool and steel to evoke Zegna’s origins as a manufacturer of worsted fabrics and tailoring. In 2003 he was also the ‘guest artist’ figurehead of the biannual Premio Furla – in some respects the Italian equivalent of the Turner Prize – established by the Bologna-based handbag and
accessories brand Furla. (Like Zegna, which has a store at 89 Neftchiler Avenue, Furla too has a shop in Baku, a block north on Zarifa Aliyeva Street.) ‘Working with art makes a brand exciting,’ said Gildo Zegna, CEO of Ermenegildo Zegna, of their collaboration. Pistoletto concurs: ‘Art is a good conductor for design. Creating a relationship between art and real-life products is a good exchange.’ Art can add depth and another dimension to a product, and the arts will always need support from patrons, be they individuals or corporate. ‘I like the idea of merging artistic traditions, especially those with a long tradition and which celebrate life.’ So transforming wine bottles into works of art that can be sold to fund opera should surely be interpreted only as an act of virtue. ‘But it must not just be about publicity,’ he warns. ‘The art has to be real. It doesn’t work otherwise.’
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grand designs Everyone knows that design is the new art, but the big design fairs are so, like, big. We pick six of the best alternative fairs for your interiors, furniture and general aesthetic wellbeing. Words by Caroline Davies
1. Clerkenwell Design Week May 2014
It’s all about cultural exchange; as east London fills with bankers, the design community have snuck into central London. Spread across every conceivable space including garden squares, church halls and street corners – which host pop-up stalls and live outdoor music – Clerkenwell Design Week has the atmosphere of an eccentric street party. This year, Merve Kahraman exhibited thrones with rabbit’s ears and stag’s antlers, the Mobile Studio installed crazy neon paving with its Mimare Maze Folly, and everyone seemed to arrive and leave on bicycles.
Check out
The ominously named House of Detention, a former Victorian underground prison in which each designer has their own cell. clerkenwelldesignweek.com
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2. Tokyo Designers Week 26 October — 4 November 2013
Despite being the largest metropolitan area in the world, Tokyo still manages to squeeze in this theme-park-esque fair. Last year’s show was themed ‘House’ and ‘Play’. Highlights included a futuristic apartment, ‘Barcode Room’ by Studio 01 with movable walls to customise your space; a giraffe-shaped skyscraper by architects Klein Dytham, and the stunning spiral structure concept by Sou Fujimoto Architects for Beton Hala Waterfront Centre in Belgrade, Serbia.
Check out
‘Container Exhibition’, where designers transform a cargo container into their miniature design world. tdwa.com
Opposite page, clockwise from top: ‘Mimare Maze Folly’, Mobile Studio; a talk by Domus Tiles; a Jaguar sculpture by Royal College of Art students; Blown-Glass Pendant lighting, Holloways of Ludlow, all Clerkenwell Design Week.
This page, clockwise from top: ‘Barcode Room’, Studio 01; concept for Beton Hala Waterfront Centre, Sou Fujimoto Architects; ‘Container Exhibition’; giraffe sky-scraper, Klein Dytham; installation, teamLab, all Tokyo Designers Week.
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4. Stockholm Design Week 3–9 February 2014
Scandinavia: land of the beautiful and the well proportioned. And the design’s good, too. Stockholm Design Week exhibits astonishing installations. Last year’s show stealer was the ‘Glass Elephant’ installation, a cavern filled with Swedish-designed glass pieces, attended to by automated arms brandishing feather dusters. ‘Black Panther’ by Åsa Jungnelius was equally dramatic, but pared-back Scando design is evident, too. Källemo’s Darjeeling tea trolley in ash wood with a red-steel frame is simple, while Dutch label Dum makes colourful furniture with clean lines.
Check out
3. Tortona Design Week
Greenhouse, the area of the show dedicated to new designers, with unseen products which are not yet in production. It’s the best place to uncover fresh talent. stockholmdesignweek.com
April 2014
Milan is so 2012. Go rogue, but not too rough. Tortona is held in the post-industrial space behind Porta Genova station, a medley of off-shoot, off-salon, off-the-wall spaces. Previous exhibitions include Zaha Hadid for Lab 23 with her Serac bench designed for ‘urban resting’; a Mini car driven through a wall, and the eerie ‘Drop’ installation, where blown-glass droplets were suspended and illuminated blue.
Check out
Late-night pastries served on Via Tortona. tortonadesignweek.com This page, clockwise from top: ‘Glass Elephant’ installation; ‘Black Panther’, Åsa Jungnelius; furniture, Dum; Serac bench, Zaha Hadid for Lab 23, all Stockholm Design Week; ‘Drop’ installation, Melogranoblu; Mini Kapooow!, both Tortona Design Week.
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6. Urban Air Market, Portland and San Francisco 14 july / 15 September 2013
By rights, this kooky stall-based fair that pops up twice a year in San Fran and Portland is a curated clothes design festival. But design is design and, when it comes to atmosphere, little beats its buzzy, carnival vibe. As music pumps over the hills, stalls propped against street-art covered walls sell quirky printed T-shirts from local companies, such as Mission Thread; driftwood stands dangle geometric metal jewellery to catch the sun, and hula-hoop sessions are in full swing on the grass. Even the locals consider it bohemian.
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Chairman Bao Bun Truck, serving steaming traditional Chinese buns. urbanairmarket.com
5. Design X
beCCa henry. Cosmo sCharF/DesiGn X. jim stephenson. luke hayes. mark CoCkseDGe. philip vile. reX. rolanD blanDy. tim brotherton.
May 2014
Tech is both sexy and useful. Everyone thinks so, particularly the team at Design X, the offshoot fair at New York’s ICFF (International Contemporary Furniture Fair). This year, it became the first major design fair to base its programme around 3-D printing. With talks covering everything from parametric design to printed 3-D fabrics – previously worn by the burlesque performer Dita Von Teese – experts from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Shapeways and Nervous System were all on hand to workshop the terrifyingly new technology. Design-blowing stuff.
Check out
4-D printing – Skylar Tibbits, the TED talk favourite, was in residence to explain how to print items so smart they assemble themselves. designx.is
This page, clockwise from top: craftwork at the Urban Air Market; Torsten Hasselman designs Mission Thread clothing; Dita Von Teese wears a 3-D dress by Michael Schmidt and Francis Bitonti (pictured); a Design X workshop. 89 Baku.
Gérard Rancinan, photographed for ‘Baku’ magazine at his Paris studio, alongside part three of ‘Paul McCarthy Triptych’ (2001).
Killer lens He has documented wars, riots, politicians and celebrities. Now Gérard Rancinan is a celebrity himself, famed for his elaborate tableau-style photo commentary on society. We tracked him down at his Paris studio to discuss portraits, art, personalities and press power. Interview by LEYLA ALIYEVA Photographs by STEPHANE GIZARD
érard Rancinan is a rare phenomenon: a former reportage photojournalist turned fine art photographer. During his 45-year career, he has shot earthquakes in Algeria, war in Lebanon and riots in London. He has worked for Vanity Fair, Time magazine and Sports Illustrated, and photographed Monica Bellucci, the Dalai Lama and Stephen Hawking. Most recently he has turned his hand to elaborate and sometimes shocking tableaus which transcend the boundaries of photography, art and social commentary; these exchange hands for six-figure sums. As Rancinan prepares to bring his ‘Trilogy of the Moderns’ exhibition to Baku, we get an exclusive audience with him at his studio in Paris. Leyla Aliyeva.
Where do you get your inspiration? Gerard Rancinan. I look
around me. I look at TV, the news, listen to the radio, read the newspaper. I talk with Caroline [Gaudriault, a French journalist and Rancinan’s long-time collaborator] about our society. We try to represent what has happened, the metamorphoses of our society. LA. Do you immediately get an image in your head of how a photograph will look? GR. Sometimes, but I also have to use my imagination. I want to be, not only a photographer who shoots a new picture every time, but a link to artists from the past. Nothing ever changes: Leonardo da Vinci, Géricault, Delacroix, Picasso... Since the beginning, it’s repetition, repetition. This is why my pictures are inspired by a classical painting or photograph. LA. You used to be a photojournalist, and I think that is why your pictures are so alive. You capture all the small details. What is the most shocking thing you have witnessed in your career, something memorable? GR. Maybe it’s the sentence of one guy. I shot a portrait in 91 Baku.
in america, in one year since the financial crisis in 2008, five million people became obese, just because of stress. no work, no money – the stress of our lives.
92 Baku.
Oxford with [the late] Peter Benenson, the founder of Amnesty International. I was with a reporter for The Sunday Times Magazine, and I asked his permission to ask Mr Benenson something. ‘What is freedom for you, sir?’ He thought a little bit and he said: ‘A free man is a man who has no fear. Gérard, it’s impossible. You are never free.’ I was impressed by that. [My] pictures are also inspired by my experiences when I was in Lebanon during the war, when I was in Uganda for the famine. When I met Fidel Castro, during four days with him, drinking, like a friend. It was so incredible for a
photographer to be with Fidel Castro one day, and then back in Paris to shoot a picture with Claudia Schiffer. LA. It must have been difficult to experience all those emotions. GR. It’s more than an emotion. Taking a photograph, it’s not nothing. It’s something important. We stop time. For example, I am shooting a picture of Leyla right now. You are here in front of me. I shoot a picture and you leave, and you change. But in my camera, on my picture, you stay like that forever. I create some small eternity. So I have a big responsibility. I try to control my emotions. Of course, when I see, in Africa or in India, young children in the gutter, drinking [dirty] water – I am shocked. But I try to control that. I try to imagine a picture which explains this emotion, this problem. Take Press Power, for example. The media is power. LA. We give them power. GR. Every government, politician and pop star is afraid of the press. Every day on the radio, the TV, we don’t know if it is real information or not. We presented Press Power in Amsterdam [in March]. At the same time we put it on Facebook. We invited people to visit Facebook to download the picture, print it and place it on walls in cities – like a tag, like street art. People stuck it on walls everywhere – more than 100 pictures. In Paris there are about 20, 25. The only way to fight back is if people are not scared of the press anymore. LA. You have done many portraits… GR. Every time we shoot a picture with an artist, it’s not just a portrait. I try to go into the soul. I try to participate, to create a kind of performance… I have taken a picture with Fidel Castro [for Time magazine]. I have [photographed the American contemporary artist] Paul McCarthy, [Yasser] Arafat; we worked with Tiger Woods [for Sports Illustrated]. And I have an
Opposite page, from top: ‘Riots’ (2013); ‘The Big Supper’ (2008), both Rancinan. This page: the photographer’s portraits line the walls of his studio where he met ‘Baku’ editor-in-chief, Leyla Aliyeva. incredible souvenir: it is a portrait of Alexander McQueen. I shot him about 15 years ago. I am very sensitive about it. For me, he was the best in fashion. LA. You’ve shot Damien Hirst… GR. He was young. He brought his dogs. Crazy guy. But he is incredible. He is so clever. LA. What was it like working with him? GR. It is not easy to shoot with him. There was a time he refused a portrait. He said, ‘No, you are shooting with a different [kind of] artist.’ I said, ‘I have shot Roy Lichtenstein, Rob Rauschenberg’, and he said, ‘I don’t care’. I said, ‘OK, I will shoot a picture with Hermann Nitsch.’ He is an Austrian Actionist artist from the 1970s. Actionist art was crazy at this time. They were revolutionary people. Damien Hirst said, ‘No, it’s impossible, he will refuse.’ [Nitsch] said, ‘OK, come.’ I shot a picture with him. Everything is black with cows’ blood. It is like a Rembrandt. I had an exhibition which included this portrait and to the side of it I put Damien Hirst’s picture. It’s completely different. Young and old. He was proud to be beside Hermann Nitsch. LA. Tell me about Franco B… GR. He is a performer. He comes from Italy but he has been in London for about 30 years. [I photographed him at] his studio in London, downstairs. There’s no light, nothing, it’s like a nightmare. It was completely dark. Sometimes during the shoot he cut himself with a blade – but not too much. Just the skin, not the vein. I was so afraid. LA. You said earlier that you don’t care about the surface; you care about the soul. If you did a self-portrait, what would it be like? GR. It’s difficult because if I shoot a self-portrait, I will never be myself; I will be another person. I look at the camera and I make a pose. I want to look nice, I want to be slim, a little bit younger, you know? It’s like when we are in front of a mirror. We don’t want to see ourselves as we really are. With a photographer it is the same. It’s impossible to be natural in front of the camera. 93 Baku.
It will always be another person. Only the face will be [the same]. LA. And yet you manage to show what is on the inside, the real portrait. GR. I was born close to the ocean, in Bordeaux, a city in the south of France. There is a huge dune of sand. When the tide is low the beach is incredible, it’s big. Maybe the best picture for me is to be very small, just a silhouette on this part of the world. Like a small, miniscule boy. When I work, I am always thinking about society, and there’s a lot of noise. The last picture we shot was a mess. In the studio there were many people, girls and boys, and music. I play [a part], I am not myself. I have the responsibility to realise a strong photograph. But, in fact, I want to be quiet, with no noise. LA. Your works are like novels because they have so many meanings. Tell me about The Big Supper. GR. In this picture, we talk about the new norm. For 40 years I have been going on trips to America and one time I was [delayed] at Chicago airport for eight hours. I was in business class but I went into the main airport, and there was a big McDonald’s. People stayed, ate McDonald’s and waited – and they were big. I went back to the business lounge and I saw a couple – chic, rich and tanned – from Hollywood or Los Angeles, with their Louis Vuitton, and a small glass of wine and some olives; no more. The difference was incredible. The world changes a lot. LA. Because before it was the other way round: if you had money you could eat, if you were poor you were skinny. GR. Exactly. If you want to eat something healthy, it is 94 Baku.
Top left: an advert for the photographer’s 2009 ‘Métamorphoses’ exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Above: ‘Press Power’, Rancinan (2013). 95 Baku.
GR. Decadence is inspired by a painting [Romans during
the media is power. every government, politician or pop star is afraid of the press. every day on the radio, the tv, we don’t know if it is real information or not.
96 Baku.
expensive. This is why we represent these guys in The Big Supper. [The slim man in the middle] is the founder of the diner in America; [he is] not Jesus Christ, he is the boss of junk food. He says, ‘I drink a glass of milk, I eat an organic apple every day for $200 in Los Angeles because I [have been] on a diet for 30 years. [But] please, come to my restaurant, there you can eat whatever you want, any time, for 99 cents.’ LA. Obesity is a big problem. GR. [It’s about] poor people and stress. For this story we talked to a nutritionist. In America, in one year since the start of the [financial] crisis in 2008, five million people became obese, just because of stress. No work, no money, nothing – the stress of our lives. We have to be rich to be on a diet all the time. This is the idea of the picture: to talk about the new norm. We shot it with people in America. LA. Real people? No models or actors? GR. Real people. These people want to be witness to [and part of the narrative]. LA. It’s a strong message. What’s the story of Decadence?
the Decadence (1847)] by Thomas Couture, which depicts 19th-century decadence. The classical artists wanted to represent decadence because, throughout time, people have lived [decadently], thinking [it is their] last feast, thinking it’s the end of civilisation. Maybe tomorrow will be the end of the world; maybe tomorrow will be the end of our lives. Nobody knows what will happen. LA. Do you believe in God? GR. Yes. It’s terrible, isn’t it? Do you? LA. Yes. I have no doubt, 100 per cent. GR. I once heard a nice quote from an English writer [Julian Barnes]: ‘I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.’ People want to change everything in 10 minutes; we have no time. But we have to respect where we have come from. People want to be stronger than God, stronger than the past but, please, keep your cool. You are only [on this earth] for a few years. LA. It’s amazing, your message. I think if more people thought like this, the world would be a better place. What is the story behind The Batman Family? GR. Modern – western – people are a bit pretentious. In this picture we talk about the people who have everything: four cars, seven motorbikes, four TVs, a huge apartment, 10 telephones and so on. It’s about the perfect family. The guy is a trader, and every day he thinks about money, money, money. He lives in a castle. He is rich. In front of him is his wife. She looks after the children. But the days are long. She doesn’t work because she doesn’t need to. She spends money going shopping every day and meeting friends. And she does a lot of charity [work] because she is bored – and boring. She is sad. So this is the perfect couple of our society. LA. They are sad people. GR. Completely depressed. Very rich. She has a new Porsche, millions of dollars, and she says, ‘Oh, people are terrible to me.’ Please: you have everything, you have to be happy. She has five boys, and the idea is that the boys will be worse than the parents in the future. And all these people imagine they will save the world. They think they are the best example to the rest of the world. And this is the symbol of that. LA. So she wants to save the world, but in fact she wants to save herself. Do you think in every society people get worse and worse? Or has humanity always been the same? GR. I am not a philosopher, but I think it has always been a part of humanity. Today it is [more apparent] because there is TV, there are big show-offs. [In the past], to be rich was sometimes discreet. Today everything is open. LA. But still, before it was the palaces, the gold. We just didn’t see it as much. GR. It is human nature, but today it is more caricatured because it is easier… I have some friends – a customer who came here and bought one, two, three pictures; just 40 years old – and these people, five years ago, were nothing. But with the Internet they built something special. And [they] earn millions of dollars. Before, you had to be king. LA. You manage to show a strong, true, sad message in such a beautiful way. GR. It’s not so sad. It’s full of humour and it’s real. Many collectors have this picture [of The Batman Family] and it is difficult to explain it. An Italian banker bought it and he invited me to an incredible apartment in Milan – super design, you know. This big picture was above the sofa, and he said, ‘Wow, it’s incredible. We are proud to have this, it’s fantastic; the design... Can you explain to me what the family is like?’ LA. It’s a portrait! GR. I said, ‘Yes, it’s just a Batman picture.’ I couldn’t explain it to him. I can’t say, ‘This is your wife, this is you – he is a banker – and these are your children.’ I can’t say that. LA. But probably, subconsciously, he understands. GR. Yes, of course.
LA. That is why he likes it. How long do your photographs take to produce? GR. The last picture we shot, The Barbarian Feast, took three months. Three months to find people, make the costumes… There is a lot of detail. We had a dog, an owl, twins, pills, food, insects, models… LA. Is everybody in the photo at the same time? GR. Yes, it’s one shot. I cleaned it up, of course. But it is one shot. LA. Who are your favourite artists? GR. I love Paul McCarthy. He is sincere. There’s no artifice. [He has done] a lot of installations and pictures about the infantilization of our society. The message is so strong. Also, it is not really conceptual. I can’t accept that art is only for decoration. Decoration is design. You can see [works by] artists from the 15th century, today in Italy or England. They left an incredible heritage. What will the contemporary artists leave for the future? A big shrimp? A dog with a flower? A big candy? This is art? No, it’s not art; it is design. When you
talk about Goya, Velázquez, the great artists, the work was there: you can keep that. Picasso, you can keep that. LA. And everybody has to say it is amazing… GR. It’s all fake. I was at the [contemporary art gallery] Palais de Tokyo in Paris – very modern art, completely extreme. I saw a small installation: a small, fake flame. Inside the flame there was a €500 bill. It burns constantly. When I arrived I said it is incredible. But it is a fake bill, it is a fake fire – it is a fake installation. If the artist had said, ‘I have two days, I will burn $100,000 each day during my performance’ – that would be amazing. Because it is real. LA. Because that gives value to his performance more than anything else. GR. And today, it’s just fake. What is the message? [Ultimately,] we are the same. I have money, you have no money, but we are the same. We are human beings on earth. Time is more important than money, because we can’t stop time. You can stop having money, you can never stop time.
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ALL woRkS © GERARD RANCINAN.
it’s impossible to be natural in front of the camera. it’s like looking in a mirror. we don’t want to see ourselves as we really are.
Opposite page, from top: ‘Alexander McQueen’, Rancinan (1999); a board of clippings and past works at the studio. This page, clockwise from top: in his trademark flat cap; a room off the main studio where works are stored; ‘Fidel Castro’ (1994); the studio is filled with the photographer’s portraits and large-scale tableaus, including (clockwise from left) ‘Pierre & Gilles’ (2007), ‘Riots’ (2013) and part one of ‘Paul McCarthy Triptych’ (2001). 97 Baku.
Empress of Stone
Zaha Hadid is one of this century’s most influential cultural figures and probably the greatest female architect in history. As her landmark Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre opens in Baku, she speaks to us about her culture, her inspiration, and how she has helped transform cityscapes on three continents. Words by Joseph Giovannini Illustration by Jessica May Underwood
This page: Zaha Hadid. Opposite page, from top: the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre, Baku; the sweeping staircase at the entrance.
I
t didn’t take long for Azerbaijani officials to realize that they had a Sydney Opera House on their hands after they commissioned Zaha Hadid to design the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre in Baku. Even before it was finished, they paid the architect the highest compliment, putting its image on a postage stamp. The new national icon, instantly a landmark in both Azerbaijani and architectural history, would represent the country wherever mail reached, in all corners of the globe. Just when you thought she could not create another masterpiece or invent her way into new architectural territory, the Iraqi-British architect has produced perhaps her most advanced work yet, a monument of grace, purity and invention. Taking advantage of new, ‘extreme’ engineering, she has dared build the devilishly difficult – doublecurved topological surfaces; asymmetrical shells of a size and complexity never built before. The new monument now greets visitors coming in from the airport, looking as though it has just landed there and not 99 Baku.
been built. With three peaks connected by white glacial flows of distorted panels set in a stretched grid, the monumental structure sends a signal of a culture which is looking optimistically to the future. The centre will become a destination site for international cultural pilgrims, just as Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum did in Bilbao, Spain. Baku and Hadid have more in common than the Cultural Centre. Each has a complex and layered background. Baku was one of the stops on the Silk Road, the ancient route along which goods and ideas were exchanged between East and West. Hadid, born to Muslim parents and raised in Baghdad in the 1950s and 1960s, is herself a onewoman Silk Road of overlapping cultures. Her father, trained at the London School of Economics, was a ranking liberal politician who advocated democracy and progressive social policies, before retiring to the private sector. In the Iraqi capital, Hadid went to a convent school run by French nuns, then attended boarding school in England and Switzerland. She studied mathematics at the American University in Beirut, before training at the Architectural Association in London, which arranged trips to Russia and China to encourage the architectural literacy of its students. When she graduated, she had survived two religions, four countries and five national influences. She was a citizen of the world who had witnessed history personally: her father cancelled her fifth birthday party because the Suez Crisis had erupted. ‘He thought it was inappropriate to have a party at this time,’ says Hadid in her gravelly voice. ‘Very early we had to understand the meaning of freedom and equality.’ But accounting for the architect as the sum total of her background does not add up to the whole Hadid. There is the raw Zaha herself; inventive, independent, funny, indomitable, warm. ‘When my parents sent me to boarding school, they probably thought it would turn me into a proper lady,’ she says dryly, implying there was never any hope. From the grammar-school days when she insisted on designing her own clothes, she was an original who escaped convention and easy categorization. She set her own career path in architecture. ‘By my count, there are only five or six architectural geniuses in the world, and she’s right up there at the top of even that list,’ says William Pedersen, the founding partner of the international architecture firm Kohn Pedersen Fox. ‘She’s made an incalculable contribution to the field.’ Another admirer put it differently. When the young man encountered Hadid, several Venice Biennales ago on the Grand Canal, he ripped open his shirt and asked her to autograph his chest. The lobby of the Mercer Hotel in Manhattan’s SoHo sees a lot of celebrities, but everyone’s cool about famous people in this very protective precinct, so Hadid eases on to the banquette of her usual table by the windows without the discomfort of being, as she says, ‘spotted’. She is a ‘starchitect’, the Helen of Architecture. The clean-lined Modernist lobby, with ebony floors; long, low sofas and white brick walls uplit to reveal their texture, is a model of understated luxury, and Hadid, 100 Baku.
This page, from top: the main entrance to the Cultural Centre; exterior view of the auditorium lobby (foreground), museum (left) and library (background). Opposite page, from top: panorama from the east plaza; inside the auditorium.
Just when you thought there was nothing left for her to invent, hadid delivered her masterpiece in Baku, the heydar aliyev cultural centre. the Building looks like a glacier spilling Between three peaks. famous for her designer style, has also chosen understatement, at least by her standards. She is wearing a short, black furry jacket spotted with furry white blossoms, over a black jumper dress and black leggings. The otherwise sensible, low-topped boots have short metallic spikes poking out of the heels. She has made up her large, flashing eyes without mercy; her fine, streaked hair flows to one side until she flows it to the other. She takes off her elbow-length black gloves before picking up the menu. She will have her usual eggs benedict, which the restaurant knows by now not to screw up. Hadid is at the height of her powers, but as a woman in a male-dominated profession, an Arab practising out of London, and a Modernist who rose to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s when Post-Modernism reigned, it is a struggle that continues. So she is not surprised at a recent Royal Institute of British Architects report that women are underrepresented and underpaid in the profession. ‘There is more resistance in the Anglo-Saxon world to women architects than in other European countries,’ she confirms matter-of-factly, no trace of bitterness. ‘And when I do break the woman barrier, there’s the Arab issue. England is very conservative. Still, the resistance has made me tougher, and in a way it’s been motivating, and I have had the support of many people. But ironically, when I was growing up in Iraq, there were many women architects. It was a time of optimism and a belief in progress. The nation was building itself, so I was raised believing there were no barriers.’ Her father, Mohammed Hadid, who died in 1999, was head of the Iraqi National Democratic Party. When he served as the country’s finance minister, he 101 Baku.
‘When I Was groWIng up In Iraq, there Were many Women archItects. It Was a tIme of optImIsm and a belIef In progress. the natIon Was buIldIng Itself, so I Was raIsed belIevIng there Were no barrIers.’ helped de-colonize the economy by pursuing a policy of industrialization. Decades later, in 2010, when Zaha received the commission to design the Central Bank of Iraq, she said, ‘He was very much in the room’. The Hadid household itself practised at home the open attitudes it preached in public, in an Art Deco house filled with contemporary furniture. But by her own admission, raising the wilful little Zaha, already a ferocious designer, was a handful. ‘My mother would bring me clothes, and I’d reorganize them myself, like taking off the sleeves,’ she remembers. ‘They of course got fed up with me, so at age seven, they said, “Listen, we’re not shopping for you anymore. You can go shopping yourself, this 102 Baku.
is your pocket money.” I’d go out and return with some strange outfits. My mother called me Carmen Miranda, because I used to concoct these outfits. But my parents didn’t want to tell me they were terrible – and they were – because they didn’t want to curb my enthusiasm. The irony is when I went out to my friends’ houses, everybody loved these things, because nobody had seen anybody dress that way. My parents enabled me.’ Baghdad was at the time a cosmopolitan city. Major figures came to modernize it. The Italian architect Gio Ponti designed the Ministry of Culture opposite Hadid’s convent school. Frank Lloyd Wright produced an urban plan that included a cultural centre, opera house and university on either side of the Tigris river. ‘I’m sure Baghdad impacted Wright’s work on his Marin County Civic Centre, and the Great Mosque of Samarra influenced the spiral at the Guggenheim,’ she says. ‘How ideas get transported to other cultures is interesting. I think Hugh Ferriss’ renderings of the zoning setbacks for skyscrapers in New York were influenced by ziggurats. I think these different worlds are connected by architecture. To me, that’s exciting.’ Hadid is too modest to say that today she is the agent who cross-pollinates cultures, bridging Italy, Russia, Iraq, America, China and now Azerbaijan.
Progressive ideas even took the form of the Italian contemporary furniture in the Hadid family home. ‘I loved the flamboyant, free, neo-plastic forms – very Gio Ponti and Carlo Mollino, although I don’t really know who the designers were. And I’m sure it’s influenced me somehow. Even as a 10-yearold, I said my bedroom was not right, that I had to redesign it. I was influenced by the living and dining rooms. My parents had a carpenter make the bed I designed, and when he put a copy in his showroom, people actually ordered it. I knew I wanted to be an architect when I was 12. My parents were tough on me in studying, but I had their incredible encouragement.’ With Italian design lodged somewhere in her visual DNA, Hadid presented a herd of biomorphic sofas grazing in an amorphic grouping at a showroom for Cassina at the Salone del Mobile in Milan this spring. ‘The sofas very much pick up on that tradition,’ she says. ‘Flamboyant, free form, neoplastic, liquid, liberated from the wall.’ For Hadid, ‘furniture is an extension of space making; part of the architecture. Sometimes [architecture and furniture design] emerge at the same time, like the Aqua table. We were looking at the Aquatics Centre [built for the 2012 London Olympics], and the idea of cantilevering;
Opposite page: the Galaxy Soho in Beijing, a retail, residential and entertainment complex. This page: the Maxxi museum, Rome (both).
Above, from left: Hadid with Chanel creative director Karl Lagerfeld; wearing Mary Katrantzou to pick up her 2013 Veuve Clicquot Business Woman award; with the artist Francesco Vezzoli. creating a large structure that would hold up, where you wouldn’t hit your legs.’ Hadid won a 1998 competition to design Maxxi, Rome’s museum of modern art, and her design seemed preternaturally at home in this most architectural of cities when it opened in 2009. The long, streamlined walls, curves playing against counter-curves, echo Rome’s Baroque architecture, but upping the ante a notch, with cantilevered steel volumes. Maxxi belongs to a generation of
buildings that grew out of the visual logic Hadid developed since her days at the Architectural Association, when she layered building parts that were shaped in different perspectives into complex, abstract, optical compositions. She manipulates perception through illusions that influence how we see, and therefore experience, a building. ‘It’s not true that Italians only like historical buildings, and that they dislike modern stuff,’ she says. ‘It was the opposite
at Maxxi. They came in droves, some riding through on their bicycles. You can interpret the idea of tradition in different ways.’ It didn’t hurt that a picture of Hadid was plastered on every other bus in the Italian capital advertising the museum, and that when she arrived for the opening, wrapped in a diaphanous cloud of gauzy fabric, surrounded by an entourage and paparazzi, she was unknowingly re-enacting Anita Ekberg’s arrival at the airport in La Dolce Vita. Maxxi, like most of Hadid’s buildings, is virtually tattooed with her persona. Retrieving the paper place mat from under her eggs benedict, she draws streaming lines on the brown recycled paper to explain the actual organizational diagram of the Maxxi. A maths major, Hadid is a field marshal of design strategy, and explains the complexity of the diagram in terms of overlapping flows initiated by different curving geometries in the surrounding city. ‘No, Arabic calligraphy really didn’t influence my work,’ she insists, debunking the oft-repeated observation that the fluidity of her design is cultural. ‘I don’t know how to do calligraphy.’ The curves come instead, she shows, from the Tiber river and the street grid, and Hadid’s powers of invention. Hadid entertains in groups, sometimes during serial drop-ins that last hours. When 103 Baku.
‘We Wanted to create a continuous floW betWeen inside and outside, to create a certain infinity. you don’t knoW Where it all starts and ends. our clients like it for the result: lightness, openness and its contemporary character, Which projects a neW national image.’
Above: the Cultural Centre’s seamless auditorium lobby. Right: the library and main entrance.
104 Baku.
she’s in New York, mixing R&R while taking meetings about projects, she always convenes the old bunch. Hadid, who has never married, treats her friends as an extended family, and the family table in New York happens as easily in Beijing or Rome. The friends reciprocate her ferocious loyalty: for her 60th birthday party in London, they flew in from Australia, China and America for the banquet at a table that stretched down the entire length of Mayfair’s Burlington Arcade. At her table in the Mercer, she is not the operatic La Hadid who appears at openings in a feathered cape or wrapped in a bolt of silk, but the same Hadid they have known through thick and thin for 20, 30, 40 years – long before the fame and commissions. She may dress the part on state occasions, but her friends know that there’s a big heart beneath the Issey Miyake and Romeo Gigli. One long-time friend arrives in a pleated jacket which Hadid gave her; another in a tie she has painted for him. Later at dinner, she orders Chinese style for the whole table, making sure everyone gets a taste of everything, and picks up the tab. The only difference between today’s Hadid and earlier versions, perhaps, is that she is less Vesuvian: success has mellowed her. She’s calmer – most of the time – and even makes a point of being punctual, most of the time. She doesn’t drink, no longer smokes, and has even given up espressos. Besides running a 300-person practice in London and handling more than 25 projects, just being Zaha Hadid these days is a full-time job. She probably logs as many
Praised on camera at the miles as a commercial pilot. opening of her opera house in Following her award as a Dame Guangzhou, China – which some Commander of the Order of the called the Paris Opera House of British Empire for services to our time – all she could muster architecture, at Buckingham was, ‘Yes, it’s nice’. Palace last November, she flew She warms up, however, to to America for the opening the Suprematists on her of the Broad Art Museum at bookshelves and recalls a visit Michigan State University. to an exhibition at New York’s After Christmas, it was back Museum of Modern Art. ‘There to America for a lecture at was a wall of Suprematist art Harvard, then to New Haven that was so badly hung, [all the where she teaches a semesterpaintings] equally spaced, as long class at Yale. Next, New if when God made the heavens York, where she spoke at the and the galaxies, he would Metropolitan Museum of Art, space everything equally. before packing her bags for I wanted to photograph it, but Tokyo, where she has just won the guards scolded me. It was the competition for a stadium. a different story in 1992 when She then jetted off to Milan for I hung a show of similar the Salone del Mobile, then back paintings at the Guggenheim.’ to London to touch base, before Of the Suprematists, Hadid heading to Yale to finish her singles out Malevich’s class. She then returned to New ‘architektons’ – basically York for the Met’s gala on punk architectural models that fashion, where she was a guest at translated Suprematist ideas the Prada table. She borrowed about the fourth dimension into clothes: ‘I didn’t bring anything,’ the third. Their theory is she says, adding admiringly, embedded in Hadid’s work. Her ‘Madonna looked fabulous.’ She paintings and models are highly marvelled at the star power of abstract. ‘The idea was that the evening, discounting herself these architektons implied an as one of the stars. architecture,’ she explains. Hadid says that this summer ‘That if you gave them scale, she’s not going anywhere, not location and programme, they even to her apartment in Miami would cease to be abstractions for the sun, or Istanbul, where and could become buildings. she usually chills every August. They could be real.’ ‘Nowhere,’ she insists. The Unthinkably, the Suprematist world won’t let her. paintings, with blocks of colour Usually architects mature floating in white infinities, also into their signature, but Hadid liberated her from gravity. invented herself early on. At ‘It’s not because you are flying the start of her career in 1983, around in the air but because she proposed a new kind of you are freed from certain beauty for a competition in Hong confining laws and conventions, Kong. The Peak, a leisure club, and can make a fundamentally exploded from the mountainside new kind of space,’ she explains, like a cluster of natural quartz about abandoning the diagram crystals. The splayed geological This page, from top: the 20,000sqm London Aquatics Centre, designed of a building as a flow of forces beams – each a long, narrow for the 2012 Olympics; the architect attends a test event at the centre. to the ground. Hers would floor of the eight-storey occupy the air. ‘It wasn’t as though I went to London. Today hundreds of architects are building – were cantilevered into thin air bed and decided the floor plan should start focused on their computers, as though in a manifesto of physics that contradicted exploding and generate a notion of flight.’ working in a high-tech sewing factory. But architecture’s conventional narrative of With amazing self-confidence, Hadid Studio 9, the original classroom, retains the gravity. Jurors had never seen anything set out to reinvent no less than the plan, aura of an artist’s studio. Her spot is at the like it and didn’t know whether it could conceiving it and the buildings that grew far end, but still part of the office pool. stand up. Yet the unorthodox project from it as force fields in which figure and Just off the classroom is a smaller room was championed to victory. It was the ground were interactive rather than discrete lined with the books that have informed competition heard of in architecture and separate. Hadid, herself a card-carrying Hadid: Malevich, Tatlin, Lissitzky, journals around the world. eccentric, saw people as complex Rodchenko and Leonidov, whose avantHowever, the building was never realized, individuals and thought buildings should garde architectural visions had emerged and for the first 10 years of her practice, offer them choices. When she designed the around the time of the Russian Revolution Hadid – great with promise – built almost Rosenthal Centre of Contemporary Art in but went largely unbuilt. Hadid absorbed nothing. But over the past decade, it’s been Cincinnati, she argued against a single the sheer beauty and intensity of the work, the opposite; perhaps the most meteoric gallery type throughout the building, in which she factored into her design DNA. architectural career of the new millennium. favour of a collection of different types. Wearing her basic black outfit, with black Hadid’s sprezzatura belies her strong work She argued for diversity. leggings as always, she sits on a Verner ethic, and even the apparently effortless Hadid was a self-invented, selfPanton chair that she might have designed beauty of her buildings convinces you they empowered agent of radical change. She herself, its profile like a calligraphic stroke were done without much effort. Not true. misbehaved at the drafting table. She didn’t of a brush. Often accused of formalism, of Hadid goes to great lengths to make the draw with T-squares and parallel rules. designing beauty for beauty’s sake, she buildings look simple and unforced. She liked French curves, instruments prefers to let the work stand on its own. For Since the late 1980s Hadid’s office has that had long been considered obsolete, a supposed diva, she avoids talking about occupied a former elementary school in unserious and frivolous. She had a wide herself, and never lauds her own work. a Victorian building in Clerkenwell, east 106 Baku.
This page: the Glasgow Riverside Museum of Transport, Britain. Below, the Guangzhou Opera House, China.
For a supposed diva, hadid avoids talking about herself, and never lauds her own work. Praised on camera at the opening of her opera house in Guangzhou, China – which some called the Paris Opera House of our time – all she could muster was, ‘Yes, it’s nice’.
‘I knew I wanted to be an archItect when I was 12. My parents were very encouragIng. they had a carpenter Make the bed I desIgned and when he put a copy In hIs showrooM, people actually ordered It.’ collection of the forbidden tools and she made use of them. What some people dismissed as unbuildable was really misunderstood by people who couldn’t absorb the leap of imagination to a different way of building. The break was ambitious with a high risk of failure in a risk-averse profession. Hadid, running what some architects dismissed as a ‘painting studio’, was all risk. Her new physics of beauty, as original as a 12-tone scale in music, required new eyes to see. It was hard to turn this vision into a career, and she spent a decade without building, instead experimenting and working on her drawings. (‘I wanted to draw things in three dimensions; most people did perspective but not elaborate 3-D drawings.’) She supported herself and her office by teaching, but this didn’t suffice. ‘During the Gulf War, even the guys in my office thought, “Oh, my God, how is Zaha going to support the office? There is no oil coming out of the garden!” There is this idea that every Arab has a little well.’ Her first building, a fire station for the Vitra furniture company in Germany, built 20 years ago, was a triumph that confirmed the viability of her vision. The structure is an optical conundrum, beautifully built in reinforced concrete, as beguiling in space as it is on paper. Since then she has produced stunningly beautiful, car-stopping, headline-making controversies from the American Middle West, Europe and Russia to the Middle East and China. Over the past five years, the masterpieces have come at a fast and even accelerating pace: the Maxxi in Rome, the Glasgow Riverside Museum of Transport, even the diminutive Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. 108 Baku.
This page: the Chanel Mobile Art Container, New York, a temporary pavilion that has also been in Hong Kong and Tokyo. and is currently in Paris. Opposite page, clockwise from left: the Vitra Fire Station, Germany; the Rosenthal Centre for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati; inside the building.
Just when you thought there was nothing left for her to invent, Hadid delivered her masterpiece in Baku, the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre. The building gathers a gallery, museum and conference hall under a pristine white roof that looks like a glacier spilling between three peaks. While it’s clearly a work by Hadid, it makes a quantum leap into fresh territory, largely because the computer had been absorbed into the design process by the time she and her associates sat down to sketch the ideas – a change that was encouraged by Hadid and cultivated by her associate Patrik Schumacher. ‘I don’t want to just continue doing the work from the 1980s,’ she insists. ‘We wanted to take the plaza and shape it into an architectural environment, to create a continuous flow between inside and outside, to create a certain infinity,’ she says. ‘You don’t know where it all starts and ends. The idea was to fuse the three institutions in a seamless figure with three identifiable parts. Our clients like it for the result: lightness, openness and its contemporary character, which projects a new national image.
‘The three parts fusing around a central atrium and a courtyard meant three different shell-like protrusions, one of which is high for the national library, on several levels. Each part has a different look because of its required height. The tall one at the back is the library, and the rise to the side accommodates the conference centre, with the fly tower. They merge towards the centre, which becomes the lobbies. The rest is a cascading landscape, parts melting into each other fluidly and seamlessly, until the building eases into the ground.’ The centre is at the high end of a large site landscaped as a terraced park with paths zig-zagging up through it, and reflecting pools and waterfalls organized in cascading levels, ‘a little like a stretchedout approach to the Acropolis’, she says. Hadid often extends the street life into the interiors. In Baku she has been able to
corbis. GETTY. hElEnE binET. hufTon + croW. iWan baan. rEx. rolandE halbE. virGilE simon bErTrand.
architecturalize the outdoor space into a built landscape, and then to urbanize the interior by flowing the public spaces into and through the building. The approach is refreshing, and Hitchcockian, in that it heightens the suspense of arriving at the plateau. The closer you get to it, the more exciting, because your body feels swept up into its movement emphatically. The entire space is fluid and seamless. Edges undulate like the body of a stingray. Beyond a tall wall of glass, a cavernous foyer rises and spreads out in curving shapes that bend out of sight. You can’t see where it ends, if it ends. The library, museum and conference auditorium all work off this hall, which has ramps and staircases that connect to upper levels. Sweeping ceremonial stairs turn the interior into a Piazza di Spagna that celebrates public gathering and movement.
The masterpiece within the masterpiece is the auditorium, completely panelled in a warm oak, with geometries that flow and turn like flames, perhaps an allusion to the region’s Zoroastrian past. Lights hidden in pockets illuminate the wood that covers all surfaces of the 1,000-seat chamber, from floor to wall to ceiling. The chamber glows. This vast building is a gesamtkunstwerk, designed from the roof to the door hinges, because the architect intended the details to disappear and defer to the whole. The inclined glass rails, the little cyclone of a desk in the lobby, the leaning doors, and the strip lights that make the contours graphic and luminous all show the care taken with every detail. You’re in a bath of pure white space; a Platonic ideal uncompromised by visible sprinkler heads, ventilation grilles or jarring door handles. The engineering is masterly; there is no sense of weight, only
lift, as though the entire building were tethered down rather than supported. Hadid drew on skills and materials from neighbouring countries: ‘The fibre concrete was fabricated in the Emirates... The interior laminate wood is from Turkey. The idea was to use the technology in the region to build the project.’ There’s a whiff of the exotic, of Turkic carpets and turbans (perhaps because of the outside shapes) but abstract, and without any condescending orientalism. She let the genie out of the bottle, and there’s no putting the magic back. Hadid’s teacher and mentor, Rem Koolhaas, has admired her work for its ‘huge robustness with infinite refinement’. Like most of her buildings, the centre is delicate and robust, refined and powerful. The structure surpasses the projects the office has done so far. It is unique in architecture, and unique even in Hadid’s career.
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This page: a Secret Cinema flash mob at London’s South Bank. Opposite page, from top: the 2013 Azerbaijani Future Shorts Festival in Baku included the animation ‘Marcel, King of Tervuren’; Fabien Riggall, photographed at the Future Shorts office in Old Street, London.
tanding on the ground floor of a deserted 20-storey high-rise in Croydon, southeast London, there is not much to see. But there soon will be. This mid-1980s, glass-and-aluminium behemoth – the former headquarters of phone company British Telecom – is now the top-secret location for the most hotly anticipated, and closely guarded, film event in the capital. In a small room, a dedicated team of 12 people work in their temporary office in the freezing cold (being disused, the colossal building has electricity but no heating). After a quick introduction, I am escorted in a lift to the top floor, where a labyrinth of corridors takes me to a small, white office. Inside, the minimalist furnishings – a table and two chairs – make it look like the interrogation room of an espionage thriller. I wonder if the drama of this setting is intentional. Then, in walks Fabien Riggall. Tall, with a long beard and a darting glance, Riggall is a master of dramatic effects, and the man behind Secret Cinema and Future Shorts – two of the most exciting and critically acclaimed cultural events in London. He asks me what I think of the setting, while finishing his salad (a late lunch). In a few weeks’ time, these thousands of empty square metres will be transformed – with the help of the dozen core crew I’ve just seen and heaps of support staff and actors – into a fictional world inspired by the (as yet undisclosed) film, for the latest Secret Cinema event. Secret Cinema launched onto the London film scene in 2007, with a screening of Gus van Sant’s Paranoid Park at the Southwark Playhouse beneath the arches of London Bridge station. Just 400 people attended. Since then, its events have morphed into lavish, increasingly dramatic, sellout productions – last year’s The
secret screen king
A new type of film festival is connecting movies, art and music around the world. Fabien Riggall reveals the plot behind his Future Shorts and Secret Cinema events. Words by ROSARIO MORABITO
Shawshank Redemption event sold 22,000 tickets (at up to £43 a pop). Aspects of the original film are faithfully recreated, from the scenes to the costumes, the music and dialogue, while the actors stay in character throughout and play live improvisations taken from the plot. Attendees become real-life extras. It is all about immersing the viewer in the story, making them an active part of it. Riggall was reshaping the way people watch films long before Secret Cinema. In 2003, he founded the London-based company, Future Shorts, which combines a short-film label and eponymous film festival. Dedicated to short movies of any genre, the Future Shorts Festival is a multi-platform event turned global pop-up festival, reaching an audience of over 40,000 people across 90 countries and 285 cities, from Kabul to Ho Chi Minh City. In March this year, the festival landed in Baku at the 28 Cinema Club for its 2013 winter edition. It was the second Azerbaijani Future Shorts Festival (the first was held in November 2012), both curated by Yarat! Contemporary Art Space, and screened seven globally lauded short films, including Fishing Without Nets – a story of piracy in Somalia, which won a Grand Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Diverse genres ranged from the animation, Marcel, King of Tervuren, to a documentaryhorror, The S From Hell – both from America – and a Czech romance, Lovebirds. ‘For me Azerbaijan is a country where you get this vibrant, young crowd,’ says Riggall. ‘They are really enthusiastic and hungry for fashion, music, film and everything that is fresh and different; it is exciting. In [much of] Europe you have so much access to everything that it almost lowers your appetite.’ For Riggall, the concept of engaging with the audience is key: ‘We are trying to blur the differences between the audience, the performance and the creation, so the audience contributes. We are asking people to be creative, to have imagination, and to step inside the narrative and the story. For example, with The Shawshank Redemption we turned an old school into a prison, and the audience became “convicts”’– issued with prison uniforms 111 Baku.
and, at one point, locked in cells. ‘With or without realizing it, through the narrative we mixed real life and culture,’ says Riggall. ‘I am interested in this: art imitates life, and our real lives should be part of our cultural lives. The experiences we live through should be about, firstly, connecting us and giving us a cause, and then about creating interesting work.’ I can tell Riggall is a true film lover. He is borderline obsessed by its effect on the public, and the potential subsequent
festivals and clubs. While the movie scene was vibrant in London, he noticed there was no platform or audience for short films. ‘I started realizing how we could do things differently,’ he says. ‘How a festival need not be limited to a small audience, [and could combine] art, music and film. We started in a club in west London, called Ginglik, with 100 people. Then we invited DJs to play after the screenings and artists to perform.’ But it wasn’t solely focused on art, music and film. ‘Future Shorts is about the social connection: how can you make something that inspires people, that brings them stories from around the world, from places they haven’t been? It’s almost like travelling.’
wherever you are in the world – small town or big city – you should have access to culture, to the kind of films you could see at a film festival in London. It happens over three months: each night, depending on where it is, we can have 50 different screenings in 15 different countries. Last year 43,000 people attended over the course of the year, with 300 to 400 screenings every quarter.’ Despite the high figures, Future Shorts seems relatively simple to organize. Riggall points out that there is always a communal space available – a city or town hall – and it is always beneficial for the venue to be used to host a multicultural event. ‘The
That first 1993 festival in London included directors from different countries – Britain, Israel and Finland – and each time the criteria changes. ‘Sometimes the theme is geographical: a world film festival, bringing different stories from all over the planet,’ says Riggall. ‘But it is always about contact – about creating a world view using stories that are somehow connected, but in an interesting way that makes you think a little deeper. When creating a programme, it is like putting together a mix-tape. We also include music videos which can represent 20 per cent of the programme.’ Once established in the British capital, Future Shorts was ready to roll out abroad through an international network of local producers who would set up the festival in their community, receiving it in a box, ‘ready to show’. As Fabien explains: ‘People apply and we give them the tools and the concept of the festival, then they build the screening, choosing the location, other artists, DJs… Sometimes we are invited to come to certain events to supervise, but not always. Essentially it is their little festival. We also want to push this idea that,
challenges are,’ he says, ‘costs and raising the money to do everything. It is also about trying to create an exciting programme of films that gives the audience a picture of the world that inspires them.’ Another aspect of short films he finds interesting is the ability to take risks: they are not too expensive to produce, which enables film-makers to play around with ideas and the storytelling mechanism, so they give an audience unpredictability. ‘Short movies should be seen like music: little flashes of storytelling that can be really disruptive. They are seen by the industry as a talent-scouting pool: something you watch to find new directors. But there is a lot of amazing work in this field that is very established.’ Future Shorts has allowed Riggall to travel the world: Moscow, Bucharest, Rome, New York, Paris. And each time the reaction is different. ‘Some of my partners advised me that some films aren’t suitable for certain countries, but I think, no, they should get used to it. You also want to push boundaries with the audience. I’d like to bring Future Shorts to Kabul. We found a partner that did a Secret Cinema screening there. It was tough but lovely. We did [a screening] the same night in London. I’d love to also take Secret Cinema to Baghdad, to Iran... There’s a vibrancy and a youth that has the same desires as me. Some people say I should do something in Israel, but I’d be interested in a screening or simultaneous event in Palestine and Israel, without necessarily connecting the two. I’m interested in culturally disruptive things, as long as you work with people [in those countries] and they understand what they’re doing.’ Riggall’s aim to use cinema provocatively led him to screen La Haine – a film by French director Mathieu Kassovitz set among riots in the banlieues of Paris – at the estates of
scenarios. One film in particular changed his life as a boy. ‘I went to see Once Upon a Time in America by Sergio Leone,’ he says. ‘I was completely lost in this adventure. Making movies is really tough, but the magic of the experience: that’s what I fell in love with. Now I am a producer, but I am also creating experiences to allow audiences to have adventures; to live a romantic life. As a child, that’s what I was drawn to. ‘The same happens with Future Shorts: you can mess with people’s minds, in a nice way – the same way a DJ plays with the crowd on a dance floor. I’m interested in disruption, in random experiences where people connect spontaneously.’ When Future Shorts started 10 years ago, Riggall was working in advertising, producing short films while attending trade events, music 112 Baku.
cARlOTTA cARdAnA. eveReTT cOllecTIOn/Rex. geTTy. gReg Funnell/guARdIAn.
you can mess with people’s minds in a nice way – the same way a dj plays with a crowd on a dance floor. i am interested in disruption.
Broadwater Farm, in Tottenham, London – the scene of riots in 1985. ‘It was one of my favourite events,’ says Riggall. ‘We felt we did something really positive, and the kids enjoyed it and wanted to do more.’ Connecting people in a meaningful way is another of Riggall’s passions. ‘Cinema is powerful because it is truthful to you. You believe it. The idea behind my events is to inspire
I venture that what he is trying to achieve sounds like a modern Greek tragedy play: some social cathartic ritual. He jumps out of the chair. ‘It is! It’s a full therapy, culture is therapy,’ he enthuses. ‘It allows you to see the world in a different way and it snaps you out of your disruptive behaviour. I like sharing experiences with other people, to connect different cultures
azerbaijan is a country where you get this vibrant, young crowd – they are hungry for everything fresh and different.
together and build a real social network. The more connections we create, the more we learn, the more the audience will react and share information about what moves them and what they like. It is the opposite of today’s laziness: an instant culture.’ In the near future, Riggall’s ‘secret’ projects will diversify – ‘we’re going to start creating big music events’ (they’ve already been involved in Glastonbury and Wilderness) – and the content produced so far will be shown on a mooted thematic digital TV channel. It will keep the same commitment to expose independent talent, hidden in local communities, to an international network. ‘That hits the nail on the head of what I want Future Shorts to be,’ he says. ‘There is a really cool scene in Baku – great, exciting young cinema. And that’s what I’m really interested in: disrupting what people’s preconceptions are, what they think they know.’ And that’s not a secret any more.
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the audience through cultural connection. Facebook, Google... it is kind of a scary part of the future. There are amazingly positive aspects, but I find it scary that they control the world of information which fills one’s brain. Technology should be used and led by humans, not the other way round. We should have real interactions.’
Opposite page, from top: ‘Lovebirds’ at the Future Shorts Festival, Baku; ‘La Haine’ was screened by Fabien Riggall at the scene of riots in London. This page, from top: ‘Fishing With Nets’; Secret Cinema staged ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ event in London; the American short horror ‘The S From Hell’.
113 Baku.
CITY OF FLOWERS ThE bLOOmS WERE FLOWn In FROm aROund ThE WORLd, TRanSFORmIng baku’S CITY CEnTRE InTO a kaLEIdOSCOpE. ThE CapITaL’S FLOWER FEaST CELEbRaTIOn haS a dIFFEREnT ThEmE EaCh YEaR: ThIS TImE IT WaS ThE COunTRY’S aRChITECTuRE. LandmaRkS, InCLudIng ThE maIdEn’S TOWER In ThE CITY’S OLd TOWn, InSpIREd ThE vIbRanT dISpLaYS, and a nEW vaRIETY OF ChRYSanThEmum, ThE ‘azERI’, WaS CuLTIvaTEd TO maRk ThE EvEnT. photographs by EmIL khaLILOv
ThE hEYdaR aLIYEv paRk (pICTuREd) SaW paRT OF ThE ShIRvanShah paLaCE bLOSSOm FORTh – ThOugh a FuLL-SCaLE SCuLpTuRE WaS dEEmEd a bLOOm TOO FaR – and dOLphInS, pEaCOCkS and SWanS WERE bROughT TO LIFE bY TOpIaRY. OuR phOTOgRaphER pROCLaImEd ThE FuLL-On FLOWER pOWER aS ‘abSOLuTELY dRamaTIC’.
The what, sorry?
It’s a first-century church, so one of the oldest in humankind.
A place to find yourself?
You’re not kidding. Christianity was just a novelty then, right? But if it’s Albanian, why is it in Azerbaijan?
Well, it is built on the top of a mountain, up a steep cobbled lane in the village of Kish, four hours outside Baku, so you won’t find many other people. It was thought a church built in the mountains made it closer to God, and a pain for invaders to reach.
Who built this church?
I thought Azerbaijan was an Islamic country?
There was a kingdom of Albania in what is now Azerbaijan. But it has nothing to do with the other Albania. Long story.
Words by Caroline davies. PhotograPh by emil Khalilov.
the world blocked out by the thick bare-stone walls.
Saint Elise, who was a disciple of a disciple of Jesus. So, pretty authentic. He built what is now the oldest part; seven centuries later they added windows and the round tower. Wow.
It was actually rather run-down by 2002 – as any 1,900-yearold has a right to be – but was subsequently given a facelift. It is now beautiful, idyllic and quite soulful. If you arrive late in the afternoon, you might catch the last rays of sunshine pouring into the courtyard, bouncing off the sandstone walls. It’s a super suntrap, although the church interior is cool and tranquil –
Worship in this church stopped after Islam came to the country. It was used as a school in the 12th century, but remained ingrained in the population’s perception as a holy place. Even today, local visitors circle the church three times then stick a penny to the inner wall – folklore says that if it stays put for more than a minute, your wish will come true. What’s this I hear of weird things under the altar?
That would be the goat remains. Before the church was built, the site was a pagan temple; you can still see some of the walls
through a window built into the floor. They believed goats to be sacred so they were sacrificed and buried in a clay pot. Is this the only Caucasian Albanian church? I have a jones for them now.
Most have been destroyed. Azerbaijan is thought to have originally held around 300, but today the ruins of only
History Lesson.
No.1: Church of Caucasian Albania
80 are visible. There is one (comparatively) young church in Nic, in the same region, which was restored from 2004 to 2006. It still holds services as there are a few members of the original community in the village. Is there a café?
If the weather is good, take a seat at the smooth, gnarled wooden table under the walnut tree. The caretaker, guide and home stay host, Ilhama Huseynova, can provide you with sweet jams and bitter tea. And, if coaxed, she may tell you stories of this ancient church, waiting to be discovered on a mountain in Azerbaijan.
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{} Maven.
In a new slot, we corner art crazies in events around the world and get an insight into what drives their addiction. Here, caroline Davies gets snappy at the preview week of the Venice Biennale, an event which runs until November. Paul Johnson is a physiognomist from London, and part of the team at Palazzo Peckham, the hot-ticket fringe exhibition at this year’s event. He is in Venice for his second Biennale. What’s the best art party you’ve been to? Carsten Höller’s Double Club opening [in London, 2008]. But our pre-party night for Palazzo Peckham at this year’s Biennale was amazing, too; we had a huge number of artists just relaxing and talking about their ideas. What’s your dream work of art to buy? Mark Rothko’s No.4 [1964] for inside; Richard Serra’s Fernando Pessoa [2007-8] for outside.
honey BiBa Beckerlee The visual artist from Copenhagen in Denmark celebrates her first Biennale. What art do you love? Art that makes me think differently about things or accommodate new perspectives on the world and ourselves. I think it is a premise for human existence to seek new cognizance. Painting or installation? Installation always. What’s your dream work of art to buy? To me art is not something one can own, but is a shared experience like film or a concert.
getty. rex.
Tine nehler is the press officer for Pinakothek Museums in Germany, and 2013 is her 12th Biennale. What art do you love? The paintings of Leonardo da Vinci because they are enthralling, like a mystery story. Also the precise and sometimes humorous design of Ron Arad at our Design Museum in the Pinakothek der Moderne, and installations by Pipilotti Rist. What are you buying next? If I could I’d buy the Biennale contribution from Anri Sala as a donation for the Pinakothek der Moderne. Which is more important, art or love? Love, love, love.
Top left: ‘Gas Giant’ installation, Jacob Hashimoto, Venice Biennale, 2013. Above left: Palazzo Peckham. Left: ‘Restless’ exhibition, Ron Arad, London, 2010.
121 Baku.
Destination. This page: soaking up the sun at the Jumeirah Bilgah Beach Hotel in Absheron. Opposite page, clockwise from top right: chilling out at Shikhov Beach; the Pier Grill restaurant and tennis courts at the Jumeirah hotel; a villa at the Sea Breeze resort.
caspian cool
Absheron is a curved, sun-kissed finger of land stretching into the Caspian Sea north of Baku. Caroline Davies has the lowdown on Azerbaijan’s chic summer escape zone.
Nightlife
This is the place to be seen if you’re Baku and beautiful, so don’t forget the hexagonal sunnies and Chanel hula-hoop bag. There are open-air concerts just off the beach at the village of Nardaran, where you can spend the evening drinking sundowners. Sights What’s it like?
Absheron is where Baku residents traditionally escape on a summer’s weekend. Where do they stay?
The chichi beach resort is Mardakan. It’s more St Tropez than Cannes, a collection of serious dachas behind serious walls. For those who don’t have the keys, there are rental villas down the coast at the Modernist Sea Breeze resort. With its red-tiled roofs, pristine hedges and engraved swirling name plaques, it’s all a bit Hamptons in terms of: ‘My dacha’s bigger than yours’. Alternatively you could go big and flash at the Jumeirah Bilgah Beach Hotel. What activities are there?
The Caspian is 20m below sea level, so there’s plenty of oxygen to pump around the system for anyone who wants to join in water-skiing, boating, sailing, kayaking and jet-skiing.
Like the rest of Azerbaijan, Absheron is positively littered with the souvenirs of a long and rich cultural history. The Mardakan castle (one of two) is actually a quadrangular 14th-century watchtower. Watch your step – the site is full of six-metre deep holes, previously used as ancient refrigerators. The best view is from the top of the surrounding walls, straight across to the sea. Sergey Yesenin, the Russian poet and socialite, has been to Absheron, and his visit inspired several of his poems in Persian Motifs. His humble guesthouse is now a museum. Ever wanted to live like an Azerbaijani peasant? Qala,
124 Baku.
Where to eat
Beyond the luxury hotels, one of the best spots in Absheron is the restaurant Qosa Qala. With its colourful flowers, trickling fountains and pillared, ironrailed pavilions around the koi carp ponds, it is a favourite with the area’s discerning clientele. As well as Azerbaijani classics – plates piled with leafy herbs, roast aubergine dip with garlic and lemon, and lamb kebabs seasoned with paprika and cumin – it also serves sushi.
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emil khalilov. sasha gusov.
Destination. Clockwise from above: Caspian views at Shikhov Beach; the Yuukai rooftop bar and the chandelier in the lobby (centre) at Jumeirah Bilgah Beach; loungers at Shikhov Beach; the deck of the Pier Grill at the Jumeirah; the koi carp ponds at Qosa Qala; Dendro Park in Mardakan.
a settlement that can trace its history back to the Stone Age, offers you the chance. Weave a traditional carpet, mould a clay pot and feed the Qala sheep: creatures with posteriors so large they can have difficulty moving. If you spot one in a wheelchair, you have not been intoxicated by the Caspian air. This is apparently an ingenious solution by local shepherds to allow their flock to graze.
20/22 Khojaly Avenue 路 Baku, Azerbaijan 994 12 480 21 12 路 www.sumakh.az
Pictures.
{} children’s eyes Youngsters from around the world showcased their photography recently at Baku’s Youth Photography Festival & Exhibition. Serious messages abounded about the future of their planet.
Clockwise from above: ‘The Ibex of the Alps #2’, Erik Hess (Britain); ‘Earth, Air, My Body’, Domitille Le Cunff (Switzerland); ‘The Protest’, Justine Althaus (France); ‘Love In The Reeds’, Will Anderson (Wales); ‘My Planet’, Juan Carlos Canales (Spain); ‘I Love Autumn’, Camilla Rasulova (Britain).
our thousand entries from 91 countries were submitted to The Children’s Eyes On Earth International Youth Photography Contest 2012, and its Baku exhibition, this spring, showed 100 of the finest. Among them, this hypnotic scene (above) of wild ibex in the Swiss Alps, shot by a British 17-year-old, Erik Hess. ‘It shows the purity of wildlife and nature when untouched by humans,’ he says. The competition’s themes, I Love Nature and I Fear Pollution, inspired images that shout not whisper, such as the second-prize winner, which depicted a pair of ibis in flight over a factory. The photo, My Planet, was captured by 14-year-old Juan Carlos Canales from Spain, who says, ‘It’s sad to see such beautiful birds searching through garbage and waste.’ Yet some raise a smile. A French teenager played the pollution protest card with Barbies in her demo dolls photograph, The Protest. A case of children being both seen and heard.
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The Artist.
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From far left: ‘Questions and Bicycles’, Makhmud Makhmudzadeh (2013); pastels are his primary medium; the artist photographed in Baku.
makhmud makhmudzadeh Portrait by NATAVAN VAGABOVA
Born: Baku, 1964. Location: Baku. Work: Makhmudzadeh
has been painting since he was three, and was switched-on by Surrealists, inspired by Impressionists. ‘But I’ve always wanted to find my own style,’ he says. The artist’s last two solo shows in Baku brought home works shown globally from London to Moscow. Pastel power is his happy medium, but his future? ‘I want to work with new materials.’ 129 Baku.
He won Wimbledon when he was 17 and has now developed an inimitable sports commentary style; Boris Becker is also a collector of modern art.
My Art.
{} ‘I have a Mick Jagger portrait painted by Andy Warhol. I got it in the 1980s when I was in downtown Soho in New York City. At the time I had just read a biography of Andy Warhol and I was always a big fan of The Rolling Stones. I am not totally at home in the art world but I like Damien Hirst, Gerhard Richter, Helmut Newton and Andreas Gursky.’
‘Mick Jagger’, Andy Warhol (1975), similar to the artwork owned by Boris Becker. 130 Baku.
Christie’s iMAGes/Corbis. © 2013 the Andy WArhol FoundAtion For the VisuAl Arts, inC/Artists riGhts soCiety (Ars), neW york.
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The Excelsior Hotel Baku is a beautiful ďŹ ve-star luxurious hotel in Baku city. It combines tradition and innovation with modern luxury and a touch of antiquity. The hotel is furnished with a melange of classical architecture and contemporary design elements. Being conveniently located near the cosmopolitan downtown area of Baku, the Excelsior Hotel oers easy access to business, shopping and entertainment centres. Heydar Aliyev International Airport is only 20 minutes away fom the hotel.
carpet chic
The Karabakh district in western Azerbaijan is one of the world’s original rug-making regions. lotus flower
symbolises life, fertility, prosperity and longevity. Dragon
considered the protector of the home.
ANIMALS
represent victory of the force of good over evil and embody Zoroastrian deities. TREE OF LIFE
the emblem of a bright future. SHAPES & cOLOURS
red, blue, white, beige and ochre are the key palette. Red, which signifies the sun, is a sacred colour. Designs are geometric, shapes are asymmetric.
NUMBERS
5,000 Carpets have been woven in the
region for at least this many years.
61.5 square metres: the dimensions
of the Ardabil Sheikh Safi carpet, the largest ever made.
3 kilogrammes of wool are used for every metre of carpet.
7 The number of stages of creating a carpet, which include loom assembling, warp pulling, washing and drying.
WORDS BY roya tagiyeva. ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTIAN MONTENEGRO.
SYMBOLS
New People, parties and places
‘Life, Death and Beauty’ at the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre, Baku, until 9 September 2013. A retrospective of 100 of Warhol’s later works. Liza MinneLLi, andy WarhoL (1979), The andy WarhoL MuseuM, PiTTsburgh; Founding CoLLeCTion, ConTribuTion dia CenTer For The arTs. FLoWers, andy WarhoL (1964-5), The andy WarhoL MuseuM, PiTTsburgh; Founding CoLLeCTion, ConTribuTion The andy WarhoL FoundaTion For The VisuaL arTs, inC.
ANDY
exHibitiON
WARHOL
Florentijn HoFman The Dutch artist’s 12-metre inflatable ‘Rubber Duck’ will be a beacon on the Baku skyline in September 2013, as part of the ‘Participate’ Baku Public Art Festival.
Ten public art installations adorn the Azerbaijani capital, including works by American artist Mark Jenkins (pictured). Until September 2013.
‘ParticiP ‘Partici Pa P ate’ a te’ Baku
PuBlic art Festival PuB
fly to baku, vienna
Johann Rzeszut and his wife.
Timna & Arik Brauer, Edith Leyrer.
Christa Mayrhofer-Dukor. Vienna’s Art History museum opened its opulent arms to ‘Fly to Baku’, the exhibition of contemporary works by 21 Azerbaijani artists, which is on its global tour. The museum’s masterworks include those by Titian and Rubens.
Désirée Vasko-Juhász & guests. The celebrated food stylist Tom Wolfe, from London, was a special guest at a cocktail reception at the Four Seasons Hotel Baku. The throng sipped Hennessy XO cocktails as they enjoyed live music, and spotted models bearing Wolfe’s foodie art, which has also adorned the parties of his clients, such as Madonna, Jennifer Lopez, Stella McCartney and Jay Z. Eat, play, love.
Vyacheslav Sapunov, Emil Akhundov, Ramina Geydarova, Natalia Golumb & Azer Garibov.
Ramina Allahverdiyeva & Jamila Agayeva.
Maria Webster & Niloufar Amini Afkhami.
Tom wolfe, Baku
Tom Wolfe & models.
Vivien Kent & Frederic Engerer.
Zena Chorfi, Harriet Blaise Mitchell, Grace Schofield & Amy Dowd.
Venice biennale Simon de Pury, Leyla Aliyeva & Albert Read. The great and glamorous of the Biennale turned out for Baku magazine’s party at the Westin Europa & Regina. Editor-in-chief Leyla Aliyeva, editorial director Darius Sanai and editor-atlarge Simon de Pury hosted the event. Canapés (Venetian biscuits, fried-rice croquettes) were accompanied by Aperol spritz cocktails. Tatyana Shumova.
Arzu Aliyeva & Michaela de Pury. Candida Gertler & Darius Sanai.
AyAn GAsAnovA. EMIL KHALILov. FAKHrIyyA MAMMAdovA. GEtty. vuGAr AMruLLAyEv.
Chess reception, london
Anastasia Gomanova & Ilya Merenzon.
Steve Mann & his wife with Elshad Nasirov.
The World Chess Federation (FIDE) held a reception for this year’s Candidates’ Tournament in London, at the stunning setting of One Whitehall Place. Sponsored by Socar and attended by its vice-president, Elshad Nasirov, the evening event saw chess champs mingle with guests whose game is glamour.
Giovanna Melandri & Maddalena Letta. After Berlin, Moscow and London, the ‘Fly To Baku’ exhibition arrived in Rome at the Maxxi museum. A reception at the St Regis Rome hotel saw Azerbaijani artist Rashad Alakbarov celebrate with guests such as the president of Maxxi, Giovanna Melandri. La dolce vita indeed.
Gayo Vojvodic & Narmin Rahimova.
Fly to baku, rome
Rashad Alakbarov. Ornella Muti & Melik Aghamalov.
The City of Lights saw a picturesque event at the Azerbaijani Cultural Centre, near to the Eiffel Tower. The ‘Home, Sweet Home’ exhibition in Paris, organized by Yarat! Contemporary Art Space, shows national artists, such as Sitara Ibrahimova and the carpet art of Faig Akhmad. Guests were welcomed by the Azerbaijani ambassador to France, Elchin Amirbekov. Room with a view.
Museib Amirov & guests.
Participate Launch, BAKU The ‘Participate’ Baku Public Art Festival is brightening up the city again, after the success of last year’s inaugural event. Its launch in Baku was attended by guests including artist Museib Amirov – all looking forward to seeing the work displayed until September. It won’t be hard to miss the giant rubber duck sculpture by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman. Quackers.
Guests.
home, sweet home, paris Lana Sokolova & Jamilia Orujova.
Elchin Amirbekov.
venice biennale Azerbaijan Pavilion The theme for the Azerbaijan pavilion at the Venice Biennale was ‘Ornamentation’, and the guests were certainly decorative. The First Lady, Mehriban Aliyeva, hosted Azerbaijan’s fourth Biennale pavilion (88 countries are represented this year) with sartorial gems including Vlad Lisovets.
Vlad Lisovets.
Leyla Aliyeva, the First Lady, Mehriban Aliyeva & Arzu Aliyeva.
The Yarat participants.
territory of the wind, baku Exhibition photography.
children’s eyes on earth, baku
Aida Mahmudova.
At the opening of the open-air museum ‘Territory Of The Wind’, at the Azmeco plant in the Garadagh region, outside Baku, founder and artist Altai Sadiqzadeh joined the art devotees taking in the fresh air and metal sculpture. Cutting edge, literally.
Reza Deghati. The Azerbaijani capital’s first Children’s Eyes On Earth International Youth Photography Festival & Exhibition focused on the world’s most talented young photographers, who worked to the themes of ‘I Love Nature’ and ‘I Fear Pollution’.
Omar Eldarov & Nargiz Pashayeva.
Altai Sadiqzadeh.
night, witnessing how different it looks lit up; to see the moving fire image on the Flame Towers which turns into a flag waver, and the lights on the hills. This was my first trip to Baku and I had a lovely warm welcome. Even before I had arrived, I got messages on Facebook from people who had seen our itinerary: ‘Oh, you’re finally coming to Baku. You’re coming to us, it’s not us coming to you!’ That kind of connection with people from different places is delightful. Modern technology is so interactive and that never stops being exciting. I’m so aware of the fact that I’m a foreigner going from country to country, meeting people whose lives and cultures are quite different, and yet, really, we’re all the same.
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Stacey Kent is an American-born, London-based jazz singer.
IntervIew by Jo burge. photograph by nIcole nodland.
by STacey KenT
Tabula rasa 144 Baku.
alking through Baku’s Mugham Centre, where I recently performed with my band, it was great to see the combination of industrial and organic elements. Tiny details caught my eye, like the theatre’s steps – a yellow band of glass with a swirling floral design. It’s a design-conscious building, very ‘acoustic’, and we’re an acoustic group. We don’t crank it up too much; we want the piano to sound like a piano. We want to hear each other. It’s a building that lends itself to that. As we came in from the airport, the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre stood out as a beautiful landmark. It reminded me of buildings by Oscar Niemeyer, a Brazilian architect. You make connections like that when something new catches your eye. I was taken by the city’s mix of old and new. You can see how it is evolving. It was fun to drive around at
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