Title: Sunt lacrimae rerum
Description: "In homage to and in mourning for the street of booksellers, this book takes its title from Aeneas's words of sorrow uttered before a Carthaginian mural depicting the Trojan War. Tragedy must be brought home to us, but how can we relay the depths of loss--a very idea predicated on absence? This reliquary is part lachrymatory: it contains a book whose text of tears is designed to tear away at itself each time the book is displayed. Pleated into an accordion, it plays the elegy for its own effacement as, gradually, the cut-out letters catch on one another, pulling themselves up and off the page until they may fall away entirely. Not only is the book's texture designed to transform, its text does as well: page by page, one letter of the phrase changes at each turn."--Artist's statement.
Subjects: Artists' books, Tragedy, In art, 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, War and civilization, Vehicle bombs, Visual literature, Specimens, Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition
Places: Iraq, Baghdad
People: Amaranth Borsuk (1980-)
Time periods: 21st century