Throughout history, culture has often been targeted during times of conflict.  Monuments, architecture, libraries and works of art have been subject to systematic damage and destruction in an attempt to erase knowledge and artistic achievements.  As this installation attests, recent conflicts in Iraq and Mali offer devastating examples. History presents many others: from the Imperial Library of Constantinople (1204), to China’s Old Summer Palace (1800-60), Warsaw’s Old Town (1939), the National Library Sarajevo (1992), to the ancient city of Palmyra (2015).

Paradoxically, what makes cultural heritage so vulnerable to attack is its inherent power. It holds collective memory and shapes identity, reminding us of who we are and why we are here.

Efforts to protect and rebuild this heritage are acts of resistance. They are also acts of hope, striving to heal a society by restoring human dignity.

168:01, Wafaa Bilal

Wafaa Bilal’s contemporary artwork starts out as shelves of blank white books. Over the run of the exhibition, visitors transform the installation – and change the lives of students and faculty at the University of Baghdad’s College of Fine Arts – by donating educational texts.

Visit the exhibition or read on to find out how you can participate in social change by helping to rebuild the College’s lost library!

Artist’s Statement

Here, hushed stacks take on the oppressive silence of a tomb, suggesting that cultural destruction is a sustained and compounded loss, re-victimizing each student whose continued lack of educational materials keeps them trapped at the point of devastation. But visitors to the white library encounter a space of duality—a memorial of loss whose persistently austere palette has been transformed into a platform for change. The transformation is multiple … The installation becomes activated from a sterile memorial to a system of exchange, trading blank art books for academic texts and the open possibilities that education affords.

As a platform for encounters, 168:01 generates narratives that multiply beyond its initial scope. For its original exhibition at the Art Gallery of Windsor in 2016, viewers also chose to become volunteers. A spontaneous network of retired librarians offered their time and expertise to develop an open source digital index that catalogues the libraries of all major fine arts schools around the world, thereby paving the way for 168:01 to construct a library on par with any world-class institution of higher learning. Rather than merely replicating its lost archives, 168:01 could now seek to build a database of knowledge that will push the College of Fine Arts Library beyond restoration and into future growth. The transformative encounters among the dispersed network of individuals participating in 168:01 cross steep cultural chasms, connecting distant localities through their combined efforts and shared hopes of building a brighter future.

TIMBUKTU

Conflict remains one of the greatest risks to a country’s cultural heritage. In 2012, as the armed conflict that had broken out in Mali escalated in the area around Timbuktu, fear grew for the safety of the many libraries in the region. Home to countless volumes of manuscripts, some dating back to the 13th century, the libraries and their holdings are irreplaceable symbols of Mali’s rich literary heritage.

The film Tutto è Scritto (Everything is Written) documents the work that was undertaken by teams of people to evacuate the manuscripts to places of safekeeping, and the work that is being done today to preserve, protect, and digitize them. The film was directed by Marco Pavan and produced by the Fondazione Benetton’s Imago Mundi project.