Aida Mahmudova’s installation is all about identification being the crucial issue of any personality, not dealing with which human can hardly reach its true level of understanding its anthropological status. Conscious living of any human starts with this veritable identification. Thanks to the fact that human is not alone in this world, this process is determined by the existence among other people. French psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan had a theory that says about a mirror phase when every person in his early childhood sees his reflection and starts to reflect upon his identity. It’s the earliest stage of self-identification, the of an abstract and ontoligistic kind. This problem becomes more important when a person starts to interact with other people.

 

Aida Mahmudova explores this process in a visual way, introducing three relationship categories each of them reflected in a separate installation: Me for Myself, Me for Others, Others for Me. In those compositions artist’s self is passing through rather complicated area of mutual reflections that demonstrate the trajectory of a spiritual journey towards self-identification of a person and its existential self-determination among other people. It is worth noting that the artist herself unconsciously emphasizes her openness towards the world that says a great deal of her social responsibility.

 

Me for myself is an unreliable source for self-identification while Me for others is a way in which people form their consciousness, in which they sense me. On the other hand, Others for me is a sort of self identification by means of own perception. Identity does not belong to a single person. It is shared by all human. This reasoning is based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of rationality. Me for myself is a partitive and mono-directional subjective perception. Me for others implies formation and improvement of personality. Others for me is what people around think of themselves basing on what I think of them.”

 

(From Forward group exhibition catalogue, Baku, 2011)

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2011 Foreword, group exhibition, by YARAT Contemporary Art Space, YARAT’s Alternative Space, Baku, Azerbaijan (October 6 – November 6)

 

2013 Internal Peace, solo exhibition, Barbarian Art Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland (June 9 – July 13)