Babi Badalov (1959, Lerik, Azerbaijan), is an artist and poet living in Paris. He has exhibited in Manifesta 8, 1st Thessaloniki biennale, amongst many others. His works have been collected in museums and private collections such as the Russian Museum, St Petersburg, Museum of Art, Emden, Germany, M HKA -  Museum of Modern Art in Antwerp.

As a visual artist, he expresses his ideas through art objects, paintings, installations and live performances. He also experiments with words and writes obscure poetry, mixing languages and images of different cultures. Babi Badalov’s work often is dedicated to linguistic explorations researching the limits of language and the borders it imposes upon its users and based on his personal experience of linguistic inconveniences while travelling.

In foreign countries, we often come across words written in the same alphabet as ours, but with different meaning, sound or pronunciation. His visual poetry often takes the form of a diary, created every day through a combination of his own linguistic research of manipulated pictorial material, mainly with political content. The nomad life of an artist (or traveler, migrant, refugee) does not only cause him or her a struggling adaptation period of cultural integration, but can primarily turn him or her into a prisoner of language. Badalov’s projects play with this kind of linguistic notions in order to emphasize larger geo-political questions.

On November 28 Babi Badalov hosted a presentationin at the Literature Museum. In the beginning, Babi talked about his personal experience of linguistic confusion, which has become the topic of his artistic exploration and expression. The "Tbilisi diary" created in his visual poetry collage-style, made during his residency at GeoAIR, was also exhibited.