Iraqi-American artist Wafaa Bilal poses with his project 168:01 at the Aga Khan museum, July 17, 2018. Bilal's work is an open appeal to rebuild the Iraqi School of Fine Arts' library, book by book. (ANDREW FRANCIS WALLACE / TORONTO STAR)
The Toronto Star featured the work of Professor Wafaa Bilal in an article about his most recent exhibition at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, Canada:
"For Bilal, an Iraqi-American artist, this project is no mere conceptual project. Every colourless book — blank, cover-to-cover — is meant not to stand sentinel-like for loss, but to quickly leave this place. In Baghdad, the library of the School of Fine Arts has compiled a wishlist of books to replace the 70,000 destroyed or looted in the Iraq War.
When a visitor brings in a volume from the list — or, a little more conveniently, has Amazon deliver one for them — they take home one of Bilal’s stand-ins as a keepsake of their contribution in exchange... The blank books function both as ghosts of the dead and a clean slate, waiting to be filled: As the books arrive and the stand-ins depart, the white shelves enliven with colour and text — and from the void comes the slow, determined reintroduction of life."
168:1 is on view at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto through August 19, 2018.