PARADE

PARADE questions our appropriation of urban space. In a clever body language game, Guillaume Martial depicts a character (himself) seeking by all means to make sense of the street furniture. The result is a new reading of the landscape, surreal, absurd and comic... [Work created as part of the project France(s) Territoire Liquide] Working in the similar manner has a 19th century photographer on an archaeological expedition to photograph the ruins of ancient civilizations, Guillaume Martial has found strange architectural objects, wich suggest that they might have been built to honour a deity. He uses the pictorial convention of placing figures in the photographs to measure the size of the objects and test how they might have been used in the past. The photographs suggest that the objects might have been sites for human sacrifice to appease favour with a divine agency. If this is the case they might have been built to worship the deity known as Jacques Tati. Paul Wombell, Curator and art director of France(s) Territoire Liquide, director of the Photographers’ Gallery in London (1994-2005) and curator in several international photo festivals