Evidence
By: Ania Gilmore, Annie Zeybekoglu
Contributors: Mutanabbī, Abū al-Ṭayyib Aḥmad ibn al-Ḥusayn, 915 or 916-965, poet; Zeybekoglu, Annie, graphic designer, painter, book artist; Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition; Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Artists' Books Collection (Columbia University. Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
Publisher: [publisher not identified]
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Boston, MA]
Language: ara
Subjects: Violence; Pictorial works; Booksellers and bookselling; Bombings; Iraq War, 2003-2011; Protest movements; Books and reading in art; Intellectual life; Social conditions; Censorship; Terrorism in art; In art; War and civilization; Vehicle bombs; Visual literature; Specimens; Artists' books; Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition
Description: Born in Warsaw, Poland, Ania Gilmore is a graphic designer, painter and a mixed media artist. She works in her studio in Lexington, MA creating artist's books, prints and paints Japanese Sumi-e. Ania received a BFA with honors in Graphic Design from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, studied printmaking and book arts at the Rhode Island School of Design, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine. Ania received recognition and awards and curated shows in the United States and internationally. Her work is in private collections in Poland, Romania, UK, Iraq and USA. Born in New York City, Annie Zeybekoglu has a BFA from Smith College and an MAT in Fine Arts from Harvard. She has taught drawing, painting and book design in the Boston area for over 20 years, and has worked for 18 years as a freelance illustrator and graphic designer. She has been a mixed media painter and book artist for most of her adult life. Her work is in collections in Boston, New York, Turin, and Istanbul. She lives and works in Boston, and spends summers on the Aegean Sea, in the Turkish coastal town of Cesme Dalyan with her husband and two sons.
Notes: Printed in an edition of 5. Each edition numbered as a distinct volume: Vol. 27, 48, 537, 1129, 6134.

Materials/medium: Al-Mutanabbi poems, found Arabic text, ash, wax, graphite, black thread, bookboard, image transfer, waxed linen.

"Evidence echoes the senseless bombing on March 5, 2007 of Al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad, the historic center of the Baghdad literary, cultural, and intellectual community. One patiently gathered up pages that survived the blast, and then brought them back to life bound together, as if someday they could be used not to just bring the bombers to justice, but also to account for their attempt to kill books and the culture that surrounds them. The thread harkens back to human hair, as the resonance of lives lost in that timeless moment after the blast, one moment of silence before the first scream was heard, before the first bits of flesh and pages began to rain down from the sky"--The Book Arts at the Centre for Fine Print Research, UK website.

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.

In Arabic.