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It’s difficult to describe Sydney-based art collective Bababa International without piling on the adjectives. “Inspired” is the first that comes to mind, followed by “ambitious,” then “industrious” and so forth. Similarly, their work provokes countless descriptors but seems to evade them all.
Since meeting at COFA in 2007 and making their first work a year later, Bababa have staged dinners [Possible Curries and Chicken Dinner] at Chalkhorse Gallery, manned a manicure and pedicure station aimed at migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong’s Para/Site Art Space [Smooth Interpersonal Relationships] and, most recently, erected soap-making apparatus in Firstdraft Gallery [Soap City], which created soaps bearing a map to a nearby temporary shower.
When I meet Ivan Ruhle, Tom Melick and Stephen Russell (Giles Thackway is away in Mexico), it’s late in the afternoon. I’ve spent the morning watching films about Christo and Jeanne Claude, trying to think of ways to talk to three totally unassuming but dauntingly intelligent boys about their art.
As they turn up one by one, Ivan tries to persuade me to order Steve a flat white. At the suggestion, he and Tom start to laugh. “Is that what he’d want?” I ask. “It’s a prank,” says Ivan. “He usually orders a cappuccino”.
Trying to explain how this connects to Bababa’s work would be overstating the importance of the joke – but it is pertinent to note that alongside Bababa’s extensive conceptual process is an equally extensive and subtle sense of humour.
We spoke about new projects, success versus failure, and when breakfast is simply breakfast.
MILLIE — Can you tell me about what you were working on this morning?
STEVE — Yes! We are working on a film that we shot while we were in Hong Kong, which centres on migrant domestic workers. One of the elements of the film is a third space that is a stand-in, in some way, for the people that are actually making the documentary – us. In that space, we’ll have a voice over and various images that relate.
MILLIE — Will this project have a participatory element like your other works?
IVAN — We’ve talked about thinking about that, but we’re more focussed on completing the film. What we do with it after is something we’ll have to discuss.
STEVE — We’ve talked about public screenings, possibly entering it into film festivals or showing it in galleries ..
TOM — A documentary is new territory for us.
MILLIE — Is that how you generally start projects: the basic concept presents itself and then it evolves?
IVAN — It’s more opportunity-based. If an opportunity comes up for a show or something that precipitates a work, we’ll come up with the idea from there ..
STEVE — Or we’ll already have an idea and then the opportunity comes up.
MILLIE — Would you say that Bababa is more about the whole than the individuals?
TOM — I just had a perverse thought about Stalin being described as a grey blur when he was moving up the ranks of the party. Maybe that could be us, a grey blur and then the work is just there – without the totalitarian aspect, of course.
IVAN — I think the way it works is that it’s argumentative. It’s all personalities but in the arguing it becomes more about the resolution. It’s important that everyone has their own intelligence that they bring to it, otherwise it would be like art by committee or something, or we’d be making work that was like our old work.
TOM — We’d be thinking of work in terms of what our work should be.
STEVE — Some branding mentality.
IVAN — We’ve tried to think like that before and it’s created these ideas that ostensibly might seem acceptable or clever or quirky, but when you think about them they’re actually just terrible.
MILLIE — So how did you start working together? You must get asked that a lot.
TOM — We do, but we always have bad answers.
IVAN — They’re just banal answers, like “we were friends”.
TOM — It was surrounding very bad ideas, jocular art ideas.
IVAN — Practical jokes.
TOM — Like constructing Ikea in a gallery space.
MILLIE — Can you tell me about that?
TOM — That’s about as far as it went.
MILLIE — How have your ideas changed since then?
IVAN — A major change this year has been in us trying to articulate social concerns more ..
TOM — And a dedication to how research can inform an idea, rather than trying to blanket an idea on a situation. Maybe trying to find a reason why something should be done, rather than just doing it.
MILLIE — There seems to be a strong theme of altruism in your work, particularly in the service-based installations. Was this intentional?
TOM — It’s an intentional way of navigating the artist-audience relationship, but ..
STEVE — It’s not a moral message. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing to pull from the work but I don’t think it’s a focus for us to promote charity.
TOM — It’s a common question, and we always have to kind of bat that down as a “message” beyond the actual action of the work itself. [Altruism] is contained in the idea, but generosity beyond that idea isn’t really what we’re getting at.
MILLIE — Do you mind when people see something in your work that isn’t there?
STEVE — I’m happy for people to receive it in the way that they’d like to receive it. I’ve spoken to people who have found the altruistic element really nice, so I don’t want to invalidate that kind of interpretation.
IVAN — It’s probably not our duty to interpret the work in that way
TOM — Or interpret the interpretation!
IVAN — As much as we talk about the conceptual impetus, they’re practical activities. In executing them, we’re probably more concerned just brutally because you have to be more concerned with the practical implications. We’ve made it a responsibility to try to think it through conceptually, but I don’t know if we’re necessarily in the best place to do that.
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