Do not forget, remember and warn
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. "Thinking about the devastation of Al Mutanabbi street in 2007, and the specific targeting of the richly pluralistic intellectual traditions of downtown Baghdad, which destroyed with thousands of books and hundreds of lives, I returned to thinking about another moment of parallel significance and barbarity: the destruction of the Ottoman library of Sarajevo in 1992, in which over 700 manuscripts and 1.5 million books were burned: almost the entire cultural history of a famously intellectual and inclusive society. This attack was ordered by Nikola Koljevic, Shakespeare scholar and literature professor, intent on destroying the cultural and creative life of pluralistic Sarajevo and all it stood for. This book began as a series of photos taken in the Library in 2006 and 2012 during its renovations, which were then printed onto glass on liquid emulsion. I have re-photographed these plates and release-printed them onto sheafs of handmade Japanese papers, whose transluscent qualities suggest layers of memory and fragility of the library, and its ghost presences of lives and books, which once were housed there. At the entrance of the library reads a commemoration: On this place Serbian criminals in the night of 25-26th August 1992 set on fire National and University's Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina over 2 millions of books, periodicals and documents vanished in the flame. Do not forget, remember and warn"--The artist's website (viewed July 8, 2015). Miriam Nabarro is an artist, working in theatre design, photography, printmaking and textiles. She is Artist in Residence/ Research Associate in the Development Studies Department at SOAS, University of London. She has an MA with distinction in European Scenography from Central Saint Martins, and holds degrees from SOAS in Political Science (MSc in Violence, Conflict and Development) and the University of Edinburgh (MA Hons in English Literature). Believing that theatre and visual art have the unique possibility of communicating meaningfully to wide and diverse audiences, her work has taken her to Iran, Australia, Sudan, Kosova, Eritrea, and the DRC, where she has created performances, exhibitions and installations in theatres, football pitches, churches and factories, with national theatres, artists, street children, and people of all ages. Recent projects in the UK include collaborations with the National Theatre, Royal Exchange Studio, Tricycle Theatre, Dukes Lancaster, Arcola, Headlong, Schtanhaus, en masse and Theatre O. Internationally, she has been working closely with the British Council to deliver arts projects in Georgia, Oman and Syria. Miriam currently lives and works in London with her partner and daughter.