Gerry Bibby is one of four artists commissioned by If I Can’t Dance to produce a new work as part of Edition V – Appropriation and Dedication (2013–2014). Stations of the research and practice are elaborated across linked presentations of Bibby's work such as the Biennale de Lyon 2013 and Frieze Projects (London) among others. 

Over Edition V Bibby will draw forward his textual practice, often referred to as ‘poetry’ and termed by the artist as ‘language costumes’. The commission will lead to the first publishing project to emerge from the artists' singular and long-running written practice. Positioned from the inter-disciplinary, and with a queer tendency to in-discipine, the resulting book will explore possible concurrences between say; concrete, poetry, fiction and performance.

Both discipline and dishonor are the things that will take me through this procedure. I do it because he* makes me aware that, although our lives are radically different; perhaps not only because he’s dead, this happens– black marks on a page.

Gerry Bibby, 2013.

Bibby is best known for his sculptural interventions and disassemblings of exhibitionary spaces. Often aggressively fragile, his works invest in the possibility for diversion, mis-use and retreat. He likes to deal roughly with the tender stuff of what is just there, the tissue that smooths the way of both bodily inhabitation and subjective estrangement.

Over the commission period Bibby will install himself as a shifting functionary of sorts, a shadow actor amongst the ongoing machinations of creative production and the apparatuses that sustain them. Training his sensitivity towards grammars of belonging upon the shadowed zone of the ‘backstage’, Bibby will be designated as a roadie; a ‘man in black’ tramping through leads, hazards, (dis)organisations of appearance.

Biography
After cutting short an Architecture placement at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 1995, Gerry Bibby embarked on several years of political activism, and collaborative and social practices until completing his formal art training of an undergraduate degree in sculpture in 2001 at The Victorian College of Art, appending that with an Honors (First Class) at Sydney College of Art in 2003. Although he had been involved in many creative and social practices before the completion of said degrees, his professional art practice did not present itself as decidedly singular until the years that followed. Recent solo exhibitions include Last Call at Silberkuppe (Berlin, 2012), 5 Stages Liberation Project. 2nd Season at Studiolo (Zurich, 2011) and (untitled) with Robert Filliou at The Artist’s Institute (New York, 2010).