Edmund de Waal's library of exiled writers goes on display at the British Museum

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Edmund de Waal's library of exiled writers goes on display at the British Museum
Edmund de Waal library of exile at the British Museum 2020 © The Trustees of the British Museum.



LONDON.- library of exile – the acclaimed installation by British artist and author Edmund de Waal featuring 2,000 books by exiled writers from Ovid to the present day – is presented at the British Museum from 12 March – 8 September 2020. The temporary pavilion is designed as a place of dialogue and contemplation, with visitors encouraged to sit and read the books almost all of which are in translation, exploring the idea of language as migration. The library will be free to visit, continuing the British Museum’s historic connection to libraries over the past 260 years.

The library includes the works of almost 1,500 writers from 58 countries in dozens of languages. And it is still growing. The writers represented in the collection range from Tacitus, Voltaire and Dante to the Jewish-Austrian writer Joseph Roth, the German children’s writer Judith Kerr and the Chinese poet Ai Quing to Elvira Dones from Albania, Hannah Al-Shaykh from Lebanon, Samar Yazbek from Syria to Elizabeth de Waal, Edmund’s grandmother. The walls of the library are made from liquid porcelain and inscribed with the names of the lost libraries of the world, from the ancient Library of Alexandria to the Mosul University Library in Iraq. The books all contain an ‘ex libris’ label for visitors to write their name in a book that matters to them. The collection can also be explored through an online catalogue where new titles can be suggested.

Edmund de Waal said: “This library celebrates the idea that all languages are diasporic, that we need other people’s words, self-definitions and re-definitions in translation. It honours the words of André Aciman, himself an exile from Alexandria, that he understands himself ‘not as a person from a place, but as a person from a place across from that place. You are – and always are – from somewhere else.”

The library was first shown at the 16th century Ateneo Veneto in Venice during the Venice Biennale 2019. Following its presentation at the British Museum, the library’s collection of books will be donated to the world-renowned library of the University of Mosul in Iraq upon which restoration work has begun following its near-total destruction by the group calling itself the Islamic State in 2015. The library of exile collection, which the UK’s leading international book donation and library development charity Book Aid International will be transporting to Mosul, will create an iconic and inspirational focus in the newly re-established library - an appropriate final home for a collection themed around the effects of loss, displacement and destruction.

The library is accompanied by psalm I-IV, a quartet of new vitrine works by de Waal. Their arrangement reflects the composition of Daniel Bomberg’s 1519-23 edition of the Talmud, a central text of Judaism, printed in Venice during the Renaissance: notable for holding the Hebrew, Aramaic translation and commentary within a single page.

library of exile is installed in Room 2 at the British Museum, a room which celebrates some of the collectors who have shaped the Museum over four centuries. It is also the room which once housed priceless manuscripts such as Magna Carta, a Qur’an of 1304 and a fifteenth century Haggadah for Passover, as well as works from King George III’s library which was given to the public in 1823. These are now part of the collection of the British Library, which was formally separated from the British Museum in 1997. In housing de Waal’s library within this room, the work speaks to objects in the Museum’s collection from the world’s historic libraries. These include cuneiform tablets from the library of the ancient Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh in Iraq, Buddhist paintings on silk from Dunhuang in China, and seals from the Buddhist monastery of Nalanda in India.

Edmund de Waal: library of exile at the British Museum is accompanied by an extensive events programme which will examine the themes of memory, migration and literature, and will include four panel discussions in collaboration with English PEN. The programme and the display have been supported by AKO Foundation.

This project continues the British Museum’s long-standing engagement with contemporary art, examples of which include artists Idris Khan and Ahmad Angawi creating site-specific works for the new Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World in 2018, and the ground-breaking major exhibition Grayson Perry: Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman in 2011. In 2019, the Museum acquired 73 portrait drawings by Damien Hirst, and five artworks by the British Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare.

Hartwig Fischer, Director of the British Museum, said: “We are delighted to bring Edmund de Waal’s exceptional library to the British Museum. The library of exile addresses questions that matter; it is a space of learning, contemplation, of debate and dialogue, as is the British Museum. We are looking forward to welcoming visitors – and readers – and are grateful to Edmund de Waal and AKO Foundation for making it possible.”

Edmund de Waal is an artist who writes. Much of his work is around the contingency of memory: bringing particular histories of loss and exile into renewed life. Both his artistic and written practice have broken new ground through their critical engagement with the history and potential of ceramics, as well as with architecture, music, dance and poetry. De Waal continually investigates themes of diaspora, memorial, materiality and the colour white with his interventions and artworks made for diverse spaces and museums worldwide.

Recent sites include the Venetian Ghetto and Ateneo Veneto for his two-part project, psalm, coinciding with the Venice Biennale 2019. The latter holds de Waal’s most ambitious work to date, the library of exile: a pavilion of 2,000 books written by those forced to leave their own country or exiled within it. The library of exile is touring to the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Dresden and the British Museum in 2020. Other museum interventions include elective affinities at The Frick Collection, New York (2019); —one way or other— at the Schindler House, Los Angeles (2018); white island at MACE, Ibiza (2018); Morandi / de Waal at Artipelag, Stockholm (2017); and during the night, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna (2016), an exhibition on anxiety, curated from their permanent collections. Kneaded Knowledge: The Language of Ceramics, a group exhibition co-curated with Ai Weiwei exploring the history of clay, was shown both at the National Gallery in Prague and Kunsthaus, Graz (2016).

From 2013-2015, a series of projects and events were held to coincide with the publication of The White Road: a pilgrimage of sorts in 2015, including white at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2015) and On White at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (2013).

Poets and writers from Paul Celan, Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens, to John Cage and Walter Benjamin have been constant touchstones for de Waal’s work and most profoundly so for his recent solo exhibitions; a sort of speech (2019) and Irrkunst (2016) at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin; breath, Ivorypress, Madrid (2019); the poems of our climate, Gagosian, San Francisco (2018); and Atemwende, Gagosian, New York (2013).

Among his major installations on permanent display are Signs & Wonders (2009) at the V&A Museum, London; an idea (for the journey) (2013) at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; a local history (2012) at the University of Cambridge; and a sounding line for Chatsworth House, Derbyshire (2007).

His first set design featured in the 2017/18 Season at the Royal Opera House for Yugen, a new ballet by choreographer Wayne McGregor.

De Waal is also renowned for his bestselling memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), which won many literary prizes including the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Costa Biography Award and has been translated into over 30 languages. In 2016, it was chosen as the Independent Bookshop Week's Book of the Decade. Other titles include The White Road (2015), The Pot Book (2011), 20th Century Ceramics (2003) and de Waal’s critical study on Bernard Leach for Tate (1997).

De Waal was made an OBE for his services to art in 2011. In 2015 he was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction by Yale University. He has received honorary doctorates from the University of the Arts London, Nottingham, Sheffield, York and Canterbury Christ Church universities and is an Honorary Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. De Waal is on the Advisory Committee for The Royal Mint and is a Trustee for the Gilbert Trust and The Saturday Club Trust. He is also a Patron of Paintings in Hospitals.

Edmund de Waal was born in 1964 in Nottingham. He lives and works in London.










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