Library Exhibition: Migration Dreams and Nightmares - visit or watch the video

Alia Syed and Nadia Perrotta's exhibition in the Stuart Hall Library responds to themes of migrant experience in John Berger and Jean Mohr’s novel A Seventh Man. Watch a video (below) about Alia Syed's site-specific film installation On a Wing and a Prayer, currently on show until 31 May 2016.

John Berger and Jean Mohr's book, A Seventh Man, first published in 1975, is an intense exploration of the individual and collective experience of migration from departure to work and return but which also has timely resonances with the hopes and fears that are driving the movements of current migrants and refugees

The exhibition features Syed's new film On a Wing and a Prayer, created especially for the library, and will continue to evolve over its duration. The film imaginatively recreates the journey undertaken by Abdul Rahman Haroun who in August 2015 walked the entire 31 mile length of the Channel Tunnel in a bid to find asylum in the UK. He was arrested by the police and charged under the 1861 Malicious Damage Act. His trial is ongoing. For this installation the film is inserted into a book (a register of ships, evoking other migrations) and accompanied by maps of London and England overlaid with graphs visualising patterns of migration drawn from Berger's book.

The exhibition also features Traits and Lines #1, an artist's book created by Nadia Perrotta telling stories collected through interviews of migrants from her native southern Italy to the UK as well as with migrants from West Africa to Italy. The book is presented as parallel English and Italian texts and overlaid drawings. In the text she draws on her own experience of migration and with helping Anglophone communities from West Africa settle in Italy. The interviews provide the source material for a video work, I Hope for Something Good (2015), which builds to a cacophony of overlaid voices in multiple languages. Perrotta has also crystallised objects washed up on the Thanet shoreline that are evocative of the journeys undertaken.

The exhibition is part of a larger project, Migration Dreams and Nightmares, led by sociologists Nirmal Puwar and Mariam Motamedi Fraser from the Methods Lab at Goldsmiths and includes a concurrent exhibition at Goldsmiths, University of London, as well as three seminars focusing on ‘the ways in which dreams, hopes, promises and aspirations are enfolded into the experiences of migration; specifically the connection between migrants' dreams and the nightmarish qualities of migration.'
A recording of the opening panel discussion with the artists and Nirmal Puwar (Reader in Sociology, Goldsmiths) and Ashwani Sharma (Principal Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies, UEL) is available below.

From the Artists' Book Collection

At Stuart Hall Library we have a great interest in texts and objects that will tell us more about culture and creativity. So we decided to start collecting artists' books, and have been doing so for the past three years. Some have been donated to us, others have been actively searched for and purchased.

We were impressed and beguiled by the beautiful books on display as part of Iniva's Peter Clarke exhibition Wind Blowing on the Cape Flats, and felt inspired to display some of our own artists' books in the library.

Each book has its own narrative of ideas, influences and processes of production. Much of this remains hidden to the viewer/reader. But we hope that visitors will enjoy the books as objects in their own right, as well as being aware of the power they have to tell a story about a wider artistic practice or project.

Photo by Christa Holka.

Natasha de Betak's Nightshade is a collection of photographs of individuals at rest, in dream-like poses. The book is hard-bound and made from handmade paper, with its own slip case. It arrived in the post from the artist wrapped in pink and purple tissue paper tied with a black ribbon, like a present.

Alongside Nightshade is Faye De Gannes' Inside the Coco, which has been discussed previously on the Stuart Hall Library blog. This book, a tribute to Faye's late mother, is handmade and concertinaed, with lush photography of the countryside in Trinidad.



Photo by Christa Holka.

Faye had visited the library to gain inspiration from the collection before making her own book. Hormazd Nariewalla 's Dead Man's Patterns (above) is one of the books that caught her eye. The book originates from Hormazd's residency at a Savile Row tailor's company.

These books are on open display to enable visitors to handle and explore them, in order to gain a sense of what the artist aimed to achieve.



Smaller books are on display in our cabinets: My Travel Journal by Yukina Narita is a small box of thirty-four individual cards with illustrations of places visited by the artist. Sofa, by Jessica Jane Charleston is a six-page, black and white photocopied booklet demonstrating the simple but effective aesthetics of a zine. Paul Salt's River Thinking: Prague One Year After the Floods of August 2002 reflects his interest in environment and landscape.




Shelagh Atkinson's Lost, Found and Kept series of '6-fold' small books are exploring, in her words, 'the playfulness of the English language', using red print in '12-point Helvetica bold, a typeface that wants to be read, neutral and functional'. Red Diaper 'explores the twin themes of identity and relationship through text and imagery', while Face It documents 'thoughts and ideas testifying to the imperfect beauty of the human'.

Leo Asemota's Testimony is part of a bigger project, The Ens Project, which is 'informed by the Igue ceremony to the Head practiced by the Edo people of Benin City, the Victorian age of invention, exploration and conquest and Walter Benjamin’s seminal treatise on art in the technological age'. The book, A5 and concertinaed in format, has an archival quality, which can be experienced by the beautifully filmed Reading of Leo Asemota's Testimony by Brendan McGinty in which the viewer watches the book being opened, and the pages turned.

Most artists' books at the library are not on the open shelves, but visitors are welcome to see them on request.

From the Artists' Book Collection will be on display until 31 March.

For more information, contact us.

Closed Week 2012



Closed Week team: Tom, Katie, Carolina and Giuseppe


Regular users will have noticed that the Library was closed for the week from 3-7 September.

We do this once a year to undertake the library tasks that are difficult to work on when we are open: making sure all the book and periodical sequences are in order, identifying damaged items and caring for them appropriately, hunting for missing items and tidying up our catalogue.

 We were overwhelmed by the generosity of those who offered to volunteer, but could only accept four people (above). Our regular volunteers, Joshua, Ahilan and Charlotte helped too.

Closed Week also enabled us to give more prominent shelf space to two of our special collections: Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s published works, and our collection of dissertations and theses, now available to consult on the open shelves.

It was also good to find time to catalogue zines to add to our ever-growing collection. Again, the generosity of zine makers and collectors knows no bounds! So we are proud to have the majority of our zines now available to library users in time for our Art of Zines / Zine Swap! event on 6 October.

Tom



Giuseppe and Carolina

The Library team would like to thank our regular and Closed Week volunteers, those who offered to help us, and all our library users and visitors who make Stuart Hall Library such a great place to be.