Loading ...U.S.-Iraqi Artist Launches Campaign to Rebuild Library Books
Telesure TV
Iraqi born and New York resident Wafaa Bilal launched a campaign on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter in a bid to refill the destroyed collection of books of Baghdad’s College of Fine Arts. 168:01 is an installation at the Art Gallery of Windsor featuring a library of blank books. It stands as amonument of loss and the potential for rebirth, the fundraisers said.
The idea of the campaign is that each donor will buy a lost book that will later replace one of the 1,000 blank books on display on the shelves the artist created for the occasion at the Art Gallery of Windsor in Ontario, Canada.
In exchange, donors will receive the blank book in order to recall the “spark that this library will represent in Iraq,” Bilal said. “I think this is just the beginning of hopefully restoring so many things that were lost.”
At the end of the exhibition, Bilal, an associate arts professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, plans to ship the books back to Baghdad.
During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the College of Fine Arts at the University of Baghdad lost their entire library to looters who set fire to the collection. Over 70,000 books were lost. Today, students still have few books to study with.
Source: www.telesurtv.net