KONDAMNI

Kondamni is an installation by 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 provocative trans-nationalism signals Jamgochian’s concern with a shared fact of our existence across the diverse societies we build: mortality.

Kondamni is an on-going project where the artist engages with the pretensions of built civilization and the world’s often secret histories of trauma. Essentially interested in the fragility we continue to fail to recognize amidst monumental symbols and world narratives of strength, 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 an orphanage for child victims of genocide who were forbidden from expressing their distinct cultural heritage; and, in Bangkok at The Sathorn Unique skyscraper which began construction after the Asian Economic Crisis of the late 1990s and has never been completed.

This installation employs Jamgochian’s signature use of the image of a space/future man and also a collection of wall plaques on which the poem Ozymandias by Shelley is inscribed. Ozymandias dates from 1808 and envisages the civilisation of an Egyptian Pharaoh in ruins. Here the poem is translated into Lidepla and the plaques suggest the deathly aura of vaults. Documentation of the artists’ other works are included as Kondamni highlights the possibility of extinction that surely awaits our disregard of the more essential or basically necessary aspects of our lives.