We are excited to announce Mandy Merzaban as our Poet in Residence from May to September 2025 alongside our Summer exhibition programme, New World Order. Mandy’s residency is part of our Guest Curator Jack Ky Tan’s programme exploring artistic practice within organisational development frameworks.
Mandy is a London-based artist and writer with a poetic eavesdropping practice. This often involves close listening to how power is distributed within organisational cultures and how this structuring of power shapes language, silence, and interpersonal dynamics, particularly in relation to the bureaucratic rituals of institutional life in the arts.
Grounded in intimate registers of grief, love and diasporic fragmentation, Mandy’s work is primarily textual, co-learning based and unfolds through the making of poetry, glossaries and other text-based forms. It is often developed in conversation with collaborators who share the hidden, mundane, and difficult realities of navigating colonial institutional frameworks.
For the residency, Mandy intends to keep a diary of reflections resulting in a collection of poetic fragments or poems in the service of deconstructing and making institutions. Her approach is typically to follow or be dialogically tethered to people she is in undercommons with, i.e. sharing a fugitive space of solidarity, resistance and creation with. She is particularly drawn to Kin Structures’ work in the New World Order summer programme as a way of seeing the institutional landscape they are reconfiguring and entangled with, both at the gallery and beyond. For Mandy, this is incubation and worldbuilding work for future organisational ecologies.
John Hansard Gallery’s Guest Curator of Organisational Development Jack Ky Tan said, “Mandy’s practice makes me think of the Pythagorean idea of the ‘Music of the Spheres’, a harmonic (or dissonant) sound of the moving cosmos that is there but inaudible to the human ear. Perhaps through Mandy’s ears, we might be able to glean the poetic soundings, grindings, pulses and moanings of organisations.”
Mandy was the Brooks International Fellow in 2022 at Tate’s Research and Interpretation Department where she developed a lecture performance based on the poetry of contracts, conversations with arts workers and reflections on institutional violence. In 2024, Mandy developed a workshop for The Mosaic Rooms about making poetry out of ‘bad comms’ which she identifies as forms of communication that use colonial and neoliberal rhetoric.
Increasingly, Mandy is exploring a growing interest in building connections between SWANA and ESEA* modes of cultural, spiritual and epistemic resistance.
Stay updated on Mandy’s residency over the coming months via our website and social media channels. Learn more about Mandy here on her website.
*South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA); East and South East Asian (ESEA)
