The project’s starting point was the collection of books from the local community (east end) which lasted about a year. Diversity of subjects and languages has become my source material for art making. These material thave been then manipulated and recontextualised becoming a new space.The first draft had a hollistic aesthetic, appeared more as a sculptural object.(photograph a)
Progressiveley within the next couple of months took the form of seperated entities that has been put together to create a new universe.(photogrpahs b, c, d, e)
NOID gallery is a very challenging tiny space (2x3x2 sqm) for showing work and paradoxically the window front is ideal for installing works easy to view from the street. Within this difficult context, i decided to invite 2 performers to respond to ‘Building my Library’ site specific project and to perform along the diversity of objects and images for the private view.
In an era of intimate relationship to objects and ownership the ‘Building my Library’ reflects linear processes of collective narratives into an open active space inspired by Walter Benjamin’s writing ‘Unpacking my library’. The installation will not be the source of the staging of cultural otherness. It is the living library that harbors a number of book like creations from fringe areas. The work questions contemporary notions of ‘selves’ and ‘others’ and opens a path to sense alterity that goes beyond the staging of cultural experience. The art is living and shows itself in fragmented montage form in the oddities of a personal library.
Taking about the specifics of the works which i have been working for the last 4 months .The book plinths are made from pages of collected books removed from their covers and rebound as many being inter-related via a third element: diverse objects abstracted from the images become sculptures. Having transcended any thematic organization, the unreadable book-sculptures, have now the potential to amalgamate into an infinite number of new books, which yield a sculptural library defying conventional categorization. Yet their sculptural formulation raises various questions regarding hierarchies of institutions while the re-contextualization of objects in relation become a new alternative place. In a world that threatens individuality, i am looking at how the Library structure becomes the ‘artists’-shelter’, accentuating my vision of the sublime.
