H Project is very pleased to announce an installation by the Bangkok émigré artist Nevdon Jamgochian. The title translates as ‘a warning’ from Lidepla, a contemporary language derived from the most widely spoken languages of the world. This transnationalism signals Jamgochian’s concern with the shared fact of our existence across the diverse cultures and cities we build: mortality.
KONDAMNI is an on-going project where the artist engages with the built pretensions of civilization and the world’s often secret histories of trauma. Essentially interested in the fragility we continue to fail to recognize in monumental symbols and narratives, Jamgochian draws on the prophecies of literature and signs of the future to prompt awareness of the inevitability of the temporary and finite. He has created projects at sites of the most valuable real estate in China where long-standing communities were destroyed; a Turkish island that housed the orphanage where the children of victims of genocide were held and forbidden their distinct cultural heritage; and, in Bangkok, at The Sathorn Unique skyscraper which was constructed after the Asian Economic Crisis of the late 90s and never completed.
This installation at H Project Space employs Jamgochian’s signature use of the image of a space/future man and wall plaques of the poem ‘Ozymandias by Shelley, which dates from 1808 and envisages the civilization of an Egyptian Pharoah in ruins. Here it is translated into Lidepla and the collection of plaques suggests the deathly aura of vaults. Documentation of the artists’ other works are included as KONDAMNI highlights the historic charms of H Project Space while heeding the possibility of extinction that surely awaits our disregard of the more essential or necessary aspects of our lives.