Ash rises silence falls
By: [Egidija Ciricaite]
Contributors: Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition; Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Artists' Books Collection (Columbia University. Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
Publisher: Egidija Ciricaite
Published: 2012
Place of publication: [London]
Language: eng
Subjects: Violence; Pictorial works; Booksellers and bookselling; Bombings; Iraq War, 2003-2011; Protest movements; Books and reading in art; Intellectual life; Social conditions; Censorship; In art; War and civilization; Vehicle bombs; Terrorism in art; Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition
Notes: Artist's book. Black paper cover, printed on the inside with a text. Semi-transparent paper printed with a repeated small bird-like shape.

"Ash rises silence falls is a quiet reflection on the experience of biblioclasm. The minutes of stillness and disbelief that follow the explosion are embodied into the quote by Kemal Bakarsic who witnessed the bombing of Sarajevo library. Burning ash from the books carries fragments of pages into the sky. Like a cluster of birds they form shapes. Or possibly a pattern that I saw as a frontispiece of Mamluk Koran (AD1338 / AH738)."--Information from the artist, email 14 March 2013.

Limited edition of 10 signed and numbered copies.

On March 5th, 2007, a car bomb exploded on al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad. Al-Mutanabbi Street is located in a mixed Shia-Sunni area. More than 30 people were killed and more than 100 wounded. Al-Mutanabbi Street, the historic center of Baghdad bookselling, holds bookstores and outdoor bookstalls, cafes, stationery shops, and even tea and tobacco shops. It has been the longstanding heart and soul of the Baghdad literary and intellectual community for centuries. In response to the attack, a San Francisco poet and bookseller, Beau Beausoleil, rallied a community of international artists and writers to produce a collection of letterpress-printed broadsides (poster-like works on paper), artists' books (unique works of art in book form), and an anthology of writing, all focused on expressing solidarity with Iraqi booksellers, writers and readers. The coalition of contributing artists calls itself Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition.

This collection supports and promotes awareness to the important mission and framework of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition's focus on the lasting power of the written word and the arts in support of the free expression of ideas, the preservation of shared cultural spaces, and the importance of responding to attacks, both overt and subtle, on artists, writers, and academics working under oppressive regimes or in zones of conflict, despite the destruction of that literary/cultural content.

Gift; Beau Beausoleil; 2019-2020.

"Egidija Ciricaite is a visual artist living and working in London. Her practice takes on a range of forms: from ceramics to workshops, from books to writing. The most recent pieces respond to the digital shift that redefined the book and induced fetishisation of the paper codex. Egidija questions and subverts the idea of the book. Egidija's work is found in numerous private and public collections, including Cambridge University and Tate Special Collections."--The Book Arts at the Centre for Fine Print Research, UK website (viewed May 13, 2021).