British artist, Abigail Reynolds, winner of the BMW Art Journey will unveil her project The Ruins of Time: Lost Libraries of the Silk Road at Art Basel later his month.
A five-month-long exploration into the complex religious and secular narratives of Europe and Asia, Reynolds journeyed along the Silk Road by motorbike to investigate the sites of former libraries she discovered in her research, and document what she found at each location. You can read her fascinating travelogue here http://bmw-art-journey.com/journey/abigail-reynolds
Reynolds said of the project, “A library is a compendium of knowledge, a group identity. I went to places where all that meaning has been voided, recently or in the distant past. The journey itself was challenging and huge, encompassing three quarters of the globe, traversing multiple cultures, none familiar to me. The journey brought me to the edges of my knowing, just as the lost libraries brought me to the edge of visuality.”
Reynolds’ journey took her to sites in China, Uzbekistan, Turkey and Iran dating from 291 BC to 2011. Where she gathered material in various forms including 3D scans, photography, microscope imagery, written text, plans and cataloguing systems. Based on this extensive research, she has created a cluster of book forms, prints, collages and moving-image works which will be on display at Art Basel.
Images, texts and other documents originating from the trip are going to be included in a book – thus completing a journey that both starts and ends with the institution of the library.
Abigail Reynolds: based in Cornwall, United Kingdom, Abigail Reynolds studied English Literature at Oxford University before pursuing Fine Art at Goldsmiths University. Her interest in books prompts her collages, sculptures, films and most recently, printmaking. The ideas driving Reynold’s work are based on reportage photography books, her interest in networks of association and how our sense of time is affected by technology. She has exhibited at art institutions and galleries in London, Vienna, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Eindhoven. In her presentation at Art Basel in Hong Kong, Reynolds incorporates a large-scale sculpture which will print her sourced images onto glass for the first time.
Newsha Tavakolian: born in 1981, Newsha is a Tehran based photo-journalist and artist. Early in her career she produced photo documentaries in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Pakistan and Yemen and gained international recognition with work published in magazines and newspapers such as Time, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and the New York Times. Tavakolian’s exhibitions include Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, Aaran Gallery, Tehran, and Otto Gallery, Florence. In her photography installation for Art Basel in Hong Kong 2016 she documents the lives of nine Teheran residents combining wall size scenery with a large video screen and several photographs of varying sizes into an installation drawn from her forthcoming exhibition and book ‘Blank pages of an Iranian photo album’
Alvin Zafra: born in 1978 in Quezon City, Philippines, Alvin graduated from the College of Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines in 2000 and won the Dominador Castaneda Award for Visual Essay. He’s exhibited at West Gallery, Quezon City, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore, and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. In his exhibition at Art Basel in Hong Kong, Zafra explores two different cities and their architectures. The drawings presented are based on photographs he took in the National Capital Region of the Philippines and in Hanover, Germany.