LUMIAR CITÉ

Gerry Bibby

PUBLIC

15.12.2018 - 03.03.2019

Info
Press-Release (port)
Press-Release (eng)
Exhibition View

Gerry Bibby, Inventory (cold), 2018 | Gerry Bibby, Inventory (warm), 2018.

In September 2018, Gerry Bibby was the last artist to stay at the Maumaus Residency apartment on Campo dos Mártires da Pátria, it was his first visit to Lisbon. He is also the first to reside in its provisional location on Rua dos Anjos. With his interest in what has been coined ‘minor literatures’, for his first solo exhibition in Portugal, PUBLIC includes sculptures from an ongoing series, and new works responding to the space and context of his time here:

1.
Recalling a probably over-used anecdote about a modernist architect and his client's disquiet with the work's subsequent implications on her private life, PUBLIC further agitates the interface that caused the client so much distress, the binary opposition of inside/outside, public/private. Some cinema has taken advantage of the psychic pressures the glass facade has inherited from such anecdotes.
Believe me, I could understand her, December into January & even further wasn’t only the coldest time of year, it was the darkest, and when night fell the lit interior played beacon for the unseen exterior, all the while redoubling itself in reflections.

2.
A (gallery) shop front addresses the street with languages known from commerce, and echoes a perversion that these dynamics play out today, where, albeit from behind the glass interfaces of our devices, the PUBLIC is saturated with the personal: from shopping lists to the inventories of private behaviours, languages of commerce and desire intermingle.
Piled up, I could see my own discomforts in relief. I didn’t want to play into dramas fuelled by disclosure, but I was witness to and could empathise with uncertainty and change.

3.
All the while the physicalities of architectures and objects stand by, ready to be enlisted by whomever is willing or has the capital with which to engage them. Inequities in scale and opportunity produce antagonisms and alliances that play out in PUBLIC.
I wasn’t quite sure where to begin. It seemed to me that crises were taking place at the very base levels of sustenance and space, spiralling outward, and so, in an attempt to get a grip, that’s where I began.
Without wanting to simply reiterate the symptomatic, from whichever position we begin to consider it, PUBLIC is an arena of contestation and contradiction.


Gerry Bibby lives and works in Berlin. Recent projects and solo exhibitions include: ‘Game on Tilt’, Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis and ‘In Case of Emergency’, O-Town House, Los Angeles (2018); ‘Auto Fictions’, Taylor Macklin, Zurich (2017); 'Conversation in a Yes/No Landscape. Insect Incest’ (with Henrik Olesen), Deborah Schamoni, Munich (2016); ‘Flexing Muscle’ (with the Bureau of Writing), 20th Biennale of Sydney (2016); ‘Yes No Future’, Point Center for Contemporary Art, Nicosia, Cyprus (2015); ‘KUB Arena’ (with Juliette Blightman), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2014); ‘Combination Boiler’, The Showroom, London (2014); Frieze Projects, Frieze London (2013); and La Biennale de Lyon (2013). His work has been exhibited in group exhibitions in institutions such as: Statens Museum for Kunst (Copenhagen), Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane), Kunsthalle Bern, Museum für Gegenwartskunst (Basel), Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin), Arnolfini (Bristol), Serpentine Galleries (London), Bergen Kunsthall and Palais de Tokyo (Paris). He is the author of ‘The Drumhead’, published by Sternberg Press, Berlin in 2014 and a contributing editor to the Berlin based art magazine ‘Starship’.


Coproduction by Maumaus and Goethe-Institut Portugal, in partnership with the Maumaus Residency Programme.