H Project Space presents an open studio in which UK-based artist Gerard Mermoz, working as curator, will present the activities of A Man [who lives] on A Bridge [in] Bangkok, who produces, for his personal use only, remarkable objects which he discards as soon as completed.
Unlike professional artists who aim to achieve international recognition, this man, from the margins of society, invites us to reflect about the place and use-value of creativity, for the individual; before cultural elites appropriate it and turn it into polite, rarefied ‘cults’ for the few.
Drawing from his experience as an artist, a historian and a curator, Mermoz presents four ‘works’ by A Man on A Bridge; staging them as hermeneutic fictions – floating traces and relics of uncharted personal ‘rituals’ – without seeking to provide a ‘truth’ about them.
Documentation, presented in the form of photos and texts – thoughts in progress – helps visitors formulate questions; inviting them to respond to the objects freely, pondering over the circumstances of their making and adding their voice to the exhibition.
The displays in the exhibition may evoke, in turn, the cult of relics, cabinets of curiosities, collections, scientific specimens, museum displays or art installations. This hybridizing is deliberate: first to draw attention to and debunk the rhetoric of ‘Art’ displays; to expose and demystify the reification and commodification of the ‘Art’ object; and to celebrate these objects as the expression of a humanity and creativity confined to the margins.
No interpretation is offered here, only an invitation to body forth forms; attentive not to reduce the ‘author’ to an ‘It’.
Gérard Mermoz (b. 1947) lives and works in Coventry, UK. Graduated at Aix-en-Provence and Coventry Universities. Combines art-making with curation and critical writing to produce individual and group projects which use visual, text and sound media as research tools for generating insights (as an alternative to making ‘art commodities’).
Exhibitions include A Sense of Place, Las Vegas 2004; Reading the City of Signs: Istanbul; revealed or mystified? 2004; Time Lines, AKSANAT, Istanbul 2004; Laughter, ZKM, Karlsruhe 2004; What do people do all day?, Birmingham 2005; Histoires, FORMAT International Photo Festival, Derby 2006 and Arles International Photography Festival 2006; Gallery Vassie, Amsterdam 2006; An Archaeology of Everyday Things, The MAC, Birmingham 2006; Liuang Hzou International Photo Festival 2006; Contemporary Art from South Asia, Coventry Museum and Art Gallery 2008-9; Parallel Lines: Contemporary Art from Lahore, Pakistan, Bradford City Art Gallery 2008; Objects in Performance, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford 2009-10; 25 Visual Propositions about Looking, Leamington Spa Museum and Art Gallery 2011; The House Project, H Project Space, Bangkok 2012; and Keramik Conversations, Aberystwyth Art Centre 2013.
Image: © Gerard Mermoz, H Gallery
