Boklansering
A Bundle of Reeds
Professor Mike Sperlinger is co-editor, with Rana Issa, of a new book being published in October called A Bundle of Reeds: Contemporary Art after the ‘Tigris’, which will be launched with a free public event at the Norwegian National Library.
In 1977 the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl led an expedition called the Tigris to build and sail an ancient style of reed vessel down the Tigris river in Iraq and out across the Indian Ocean. Fifty years on, one of the original Tigris crew members, an Iraqi artist called Rashad Selim, has returned to Iraq’s waterways and developed his own initiative, Safina Projects, to revive the boat-building traditions of Iraq, devastated by numerous wars since the time of the original expedition.
A Bundle of Reeds takes the coordinates of the Tigris expedition and Selim’s subsequent work as a matrix to explore changing conceptions of art, collectivity and technology. It brings together a wide range of artists and thinkers who are developing new frameworks for understanding the region traversed by the Tigris river, from Turkey and Iraq to the Arabian Sea.
For the launch event, Rashad Selim will visit Norway for the first time and – together with his partner in Safina Projects, Hannah Lewis – he will present the project Ark Re-Imagined (2015-present): a community-based project drawing on the metaphor of the Mesopotamian ark, which has developed a network of local boat clubs, a maritime museum in Basra, and an exhibition for the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennial, amongst its many outcomes.
After the talk, Selim and Lewis will be joined in conversation by Rana Issa and Mike Sperlinger. The editing of the book is part of Mike Sperlinger’s artistic development work (KUF) at Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO).
The event is organised by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (www.oca.no), the publisher of A Bundle of Reeds.
This event will take place in English.
Free entry.