Quelques Corps Favorables
Artistic research, participatory epistolary action, audio, photography, work in progress since 2020.
This longterm research project takes as its conceptual and material starting point a 2017 research visit to the private library of French photographer and writer Hervé Guibert, whose book collection has been preserved at the Paris home of his executor since his 1991 death from AIDS. The protagonist of Nemer’s research is a collection of fifty-six picture postcards that appear in numerous photographs of Hervé’s library, but which were dispersed after his death.With the help of friends, lovers, colleagues, and strangers across Europe, Nemer has undertaken a process of identifying and collecting as many of the postcards that appear in Guibert’s photograph as possible; to essentially “re-collect” this missing visual and relational material from his library.
Nemer’s research seeks to imagine alternative approaches to art historiography and the forging of queer kinship bonds through the design of participatory, community-generating gestures involving epistolary actions and performative museum visits across Europe. The project takes diverse expressive forms,
Nemer’s research seeks to imagine alternative approaches to art historiography and the forging of queer kinship bonds through the design of participatory, community-generating gestures involving epistolary actions and performative museum visits across Europe. The project takes diverse expressive forms,
include the scripting of a performance lecture that has been delivered at the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), McGill University (Montréal), Holocaust Centre North (Huddington), and KASK+Conservatorium (Ghent); a research exhibition at La Chaufferie (Romainville); and research actions involving the creation and distribution of Nemer’s own postcard series at Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid) and a-pass (Brussels).
Nemer has also produced a suite of audio letters addressed to Hervé as well as contributors to his postcard research, entitled Lettres Parisiennes. For an exhibition at the Ystads Konstmuseum in 2022, one of the audio letters—addressed to artist Conny Karlsson Lundgren and including epistolary writing by Eli Levén—was exhibited with an accompanying wall arrangement of forty-five postcards. An exhibition of audio letters, postcard arrangements, and floral compositions issuing from Nemer’s research is scheduled for April 2025 at Convent, Ghent.
Nemer’s research is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts (Ottawa), the Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid) and KASK & Conservatorium (Ghent).
Nemer has also produced a suite of audio letters addressed to Hervé as well as contributors to his postcard research, entitled Lettres Parisiennes. For an exhibition at the Ystads Konstmuseum in 2022, one of the audio letters—addressed to artist Conny Karlsson Lundgren and including epistolary writing by Eli Levén—was exhibited with an accompanying wall arrangement of forty-five postcards. An exhibition of audio letters, postcard arrangements, and floral compositions issuing from Nemer’s research is scheduled for April 2025 at Convent, Ghent.
Nemer’s research is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts (Ottawa), the Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid) and KASK & Conservatorium (Ghent).
