Title: Freedom is in the air
Description: 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.

"Love is in the air. I am thinking of Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Egypt, Afghanistan ... But freedom even begins just when I'm out in nature, watching animals, listening to their sounds, and to the wind ... and in the air, there are my ideas, and I try to catch them, and 'fix them' in to these artists' books for Al-Mutanabbi Street. May there always be freedom for books in the world!"--Artist's statement from the Book Arts at the Centre for Fine Print Research, UK website.
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, Cultural property, Destruction and pillage, Animals in art, Intellectual freedom, Nature in art, Artists' books
Places: Iraq, Baghdad, Germany, Rastede
People: Ahlrich van Ohlen
Time periods: 21st century