As curator, UK-based artist Gerard Mermoz will present the activities of a man living on a bridge in Bangkok who produces remarkable objects for his personal use, which he then discards.
Unlike professional artists who aim to achieve international recognition, this man, from the margins of society, invites us to reflect on the place and use-value of creativity for the individual before cultural elites appropriate it and turn it into polite, rarefied cult objects for the few.
Drawing from his experience as an artist, a historian and a curator, Mermoz presents four "works" in "A Man on A Bridge _ Bangkok", staging them as interpretive 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, helps visitors formulate questions.
They are invited 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 hybridising is deliberate _ first to draw attention to and debunk the rhetoric of art displays, to expose and demystify the reification and commodification of art objects, and to celebrate these objects as the expression of humanity and creativity confined to the margins.
