By Farah Khelil
Located in Los Angeles, CA
Farah Khelil, Mo’jam, Fine Art Print, 99.7 x 150 cm, 2015
antoine lefebvre editions
bookworm, curated by Antoine Lefebvre
The boundaries between passion and destruction fade away.
bookworms is an transnational transmedia artists’ project about book-loving and book-eating, conservation and conservatism, passion and destruction.
From the encounter with a destroyed book stems a reflection between two artists who are both passionate about books. It is important for us to present this project in different countries because the issues of transmission of knowledge are everywhere the same.
This project is about the ignorants for whom knowledge, intelligence and education has become a threat and who seek to drag others with them into darkness. For Khelil, the book eaters are thinkers and intellectuals against conservatism and dogmatism.
***
bookworms is an artists’ project about book-loving and book-eating, conservation and conservatism, passion and destruction
This project is the fruit of a very special encounter with an object…
After the death of her grandfather in 2012, Tunisian artist Farah Khelil (b. 1980) explored his library and found an old family dictionary in Arabic (Mo'jam Arabia), at least what was left of it, for it had been devoured by book eaters. She decided to collect some fragments without knowing what she would do with them. Impressed by how carefully cut the pieces were, she wanted to transform them into artworks that would honor the memory of her grandfather.
Because she knew how important the book object is in my artistic practice, she showed me the fragments and invited me to participate in an exhibition at the Tunisian gallery A.GORGI in her hometown Sidi Bou Said. I then thought about introducing her to Barbara Denis-Morel, the curator of the Avranches Library. This library conserves, among other treasures, more than 200 medieval manuscripts from the abbey of the Mont Saint-Michel, but it also holds a few books that were entirely devoured. Thanks to the curator, we could consult old books that were infected, quarantined, pierced by galleries and routes that revealed the passage of book-eating insects. We filmed these pages to create a video that we entitled ALL THE MEMORY IN THE WORLD, Toute la mémoire du monde, which is an appropriation of the eponymous film by Alain Resnais.
Farah had also kept some intact pages of the devoured dictionary. Then we used this sequence of 120 pages to build the lay-out structure of an artist’s book. The idea was to empty all the textual content —captions and definitions— to keep only the figures, the dropped initials, and the page numbers. The emptied columns of the dictionary were then filled with artistic contributions and texts that we commissioned to invited authors.
Printed in an edition of 500 copies, this artist book was made by Farah Khelil and antoine lefebvre editions from the remains of a devoured book. It will be a key element, of this second presentation of the project, and a special edition with a bookstand will produced especially for the fair.
Behind the idea of book-eating insects, there is the issue of conservation but also of conservatism, as in Solitaire, an installation Khelil made with a peg solitaire game and mothballs. This work is a “portrait” of her grandfather, Abdelaziz Majdoub, who taught Arabic at the Sadiki High School for a long time where he specialized in “ilm al-kalam,” the science of language. This project is imbued with nostalgia, it is reminder for the artist of the time she spent as a child with this thinker always with his head in books.
These encyclopedic pieces transformed into artworks draw the territories and communal places of knowledge. They are extensions of a family memory and reflect a culture going back and forth between book-loving and book-eating, conservation and conservatism.
This idea of book destruction is one of the main dangers threatening the library and the books that compose it: fire, water and confinement. But there is also this minor or mediocre scourge that intend to harm the books: the book eaters.
This exhibition is a metaphor, a reflection on ignorance, not as opposed to knowledge but as an enemy of knowledge. Ignorance is what attempts to undermine the intelligence, kill or reduce it. Just like the bookworms...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Conceptual Mixed Media
