18 Jul 2017

The House that Heals the Soul at CCA Glasgow

This summer's exhibition at CCA focuses on the political and social status of libraries. Programmed in collaboration with artist Nick Thurston, CCA's exhibition spaces will be opened up to house a selection of library and self-publishing resources alongside artworks that look at various histories of – and approaches towards – the protection and presentation of libraries' collections, infrastructures and users.

The House that Heals the Soul includes artworks that explore the loss of libraries and books, and questions how controlling access to them can be a political strategy of occupation. Alongside typical and atypical library resources, the exhibition will also include a series of artworks examining readers' relationships to publications, alternative politics of collecting publications, and technologies for disseminating and archiving them. Digital sharing platforms will also have a presence in the space, and there will be a series of talks by artists and practitioners throughout the show exploring our ever-changing relationships with public sites for knowledge development and exchange. The exhibition will support a dialogue around the importance of the librarian as an interlocutor, artist and curator, as well as giving access to CCA's spaces for visitors to read, view and produce.

A wide range of artists and organisations will be part of The House that Heals the Soul including The Book Lovers, Beatrice Catanzaro, Curandi Katz, Sean Dockray & Benjamin Forster, Emily Jacir, My Bookcase, OOMK, Publication Studio Glasgow, The Serving Library, Temporary Services and Nick Thurston.

The Book Lovers is a collaboration between curator Joanna Zielińska and artist David Maroto focused on research into the artist's novel employed as a medium in the visual arts. The Book Lovers' entire collection of books will be on display in The House that Heals the Soul. Over 400 publications will be in the gallery – the largest collection in the exhibition – all artist's novels. The books will be available for people to read within the gallery. The Book Lovers' participation in The House that Heals the Soul is supported by the Mondriaan Fund.

Beatrice Catanzaro produces public art interventions with a special focus on social and political dynamics. In this exhibition, an installation representing the final outcome of A Needle in the Binding, her long-term research project with former Palestinian prisoners, will be on display. The project began with the prisoners' book section of the Nablus Municipality Library which hosts approximately 8000 books read by Palestinian political prisoners between 1972 and 1995, alongside 870 hand-written notebooks; it considered access to books in prison and included the conservation of old and neglected books by the former prisoners and Catanzaro.

Curandi Katz (Valentina Curandi and Nathaniel Katz) are an artistic duo who have been working collaboratively since 2008. The Pacifist Library is an ongoing project of diverse interventions, centred on a mobile library articulated in different ways. All the books within the mobile library have a strong focus on ethical concerns and the connection between art and social change. The rucksack used for the nomadic, travelling library in Queens, New York will be on display during this exhibition, along with a selection of books from the project.

Benjamin Forster and Sean Dockray have been developing /dat library/ together, a peer-to-peer library of libraries that is built on top of the decentralised data-sharing tool called dat. Their work in The House that Heals the Soul is a desktop app which disseminates, shares and copies digital libraries. It allows users to add to, and create, their own libraries. It will be displayed on a computer in the gallery, alongside other computers in the space where visitors can access design software, links to artists projects and other online tools.

Emily Jacir is an artist and filmmaker who is primarily concerned with transformation, questions of translation, resistance and silenced historical narratives. Six photographs - extracts from a project called Untitled (fragment from ex libris) - will be on display during this exhibition. ex libris (2010-2012) commemorates the approximately thirty thousand books from Palestinian homes, libraries and institutions that were looted by Israeli authorities in 1948.

Founded in Glasgow in 2014 by artist Cristina Garriga, My Bookcase is a social enterprise that creatively explores the role of the book and its reader in today's society. In 2017, Katie Reid and Julia Doz joined Garriga to expand My Bookcase across Glasgow, Barcelona and Amsterdam. My Bookcase will host a space in the gallery where books will be shared and exchanged in an informal way, and will present a workshop detailing how the space was produced. Following the exhibition, the exhcange space will be transferred to the bookshelves in the CCA foyer.

One of My Kind (OOMK) is a highly visual, handcrafted small-press printed zine; OOMK is run by Sofia Niazi, Rose Nordin and Heiba Lamara who also host regular creative events. OOMK welcomes contributions from women of diverse ethnic and spiritual backgrounds, and is especially keen to be inclusive of Muslim women. A bookshelf with their publications and zines will be in the gallery, and OOMK will also lead an all-day workshop on creating a publication or book on 1 September.

Publication Studio Glasgow is also an open source printing facility housed at CCA. During The House that Heals the Soul, it will move into the gallery spaces as an open-source resource for self-publishing. CCA and Publication Studio partners – My Bookcase, Good Press Gallery, A Feral Studio and Joanna Peace – will run a series of workshops and inductions, enabling any member of the public to design, print and bind their own book edition.

The Serving Library is an artist-run organisation founded in 2011 to develop a shared toolkit for artist-centred education and discourse through publishing and collecting. The Serving Library commission artworks that respond to text and language including framed prints, photographs, objects and ephemera. More than 100 objects are on display at The Serving Library's building in Liverpool; a selection of these commissions will come to CCA this summer.

Temporary Services (Brett Bloom and Marc Fischer) started as an experimental exhibition space in Chicago, and now produces exhibitions, events, projects and publications. The Booklet Cloud - forty publications from Temporary Services and Half Letter Press, hung from above - will be installed at CCA. Also available will be booklets from the Self Reliance Library, which collates reference materials and information about books - exploring a multitude of ideas including skills sharing, technologies, design and ecology.

For the show, Nick Thurston will present Drag-Nets, an adjusted re-print of James Joyce's Ulysses – a book effectively banned in the US in the 1920s. The installation includes a stack of free-to-take dust jackets for censored books, and a single copy of Ulysses with the title, author and dates matching the new Drag-Nets cover. The dust jackets can be taken and creased around any book that one wishes to secretly distribute. The book will be legally registered and any time the cover jacket is seen or the barcode scanned it will identify the volume it conceals as Drag-Nets by Arthur West.

Ainslie Roddick, CCA Curator said: 'This exhibition brings together several important projects which look at how knowledge and histories have been shared across, and despite of, borders and regimes of censorship. Our temporary library of libraries will become space for exchange, where the 'political' potential of books and texts is explored in many facets.'

Public libraries have become one of the last remaining spaces where people can gather without expectation or requirement. As the future of libraries becomes increasingly precarious, The House that Heals the Soul aims to expand on the potential of libraries as sites of resistance, shelter, preservation, creation and restitution, and to do so in a dynamically public way as a functioning library of libraries.

Viviana Checchia, Public Engagement Curator at CCA said: 'Galleries and libraries have something quite significant in common; they both represent a safe and welcoming platform where conversations can happen in a way no other public place can offer. That is one of the reasons we decided to transform our galleries into a social hub consisting of an open exhibition space, a library and a publication studio. We hope this will foster and encourage even greater engagement in our already vivid spaces.'

This project marks the beginning of a series of summer exhibitions in CCA's main galleries that will open the rooms up as spaces for meeting and exchange, providing the resources and facilities for more activities to be led by our communities.

Francis McKee, CCA Director said: 'We are very excited about our forthcoming show – The House that Heals the Soul – which will stretch our regular exhibition format. There will be a series of curated artworks but we are also setting aside space in the main gallery where artists and community groups who responded to an open call will present their own projects. This is an experiment to see if we can introduce a greater degree of autonomy into our exhibition format, testing the role of open source in that context as well as in our partner programme.'

Following an open call for proposals from individuals and groups to contribute library collections, host their own events or use the gallery as a space to meet during The House That Heals the Soul, a related programme of events has been created. Events will take place throughout the run of the exhibition.

The House that Heals the Soul
The Book Lovers, Beatrice Catanzaro, Curandi-Katz, Sean Dockray & Benjamin Forster, Emily Jacir, My Bookcase, OOMK, Publication Studio Glasgow, The Serving Library, Temporary Services & Nick Thurston

Saturday 22 July – Sunday 3 September 2017
Preview: Friday 21 July, 7pm-9pm
Tue-Sat: 11am-6pm // Sun: 12noon-6pm // Free

Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), 350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, G2 3JD
For full details, please see www.cca-glasgow.com

Events:

The Book Lovers, Not a Concept but a Story - talk
Sat 22 Jul, 1pm, CCA Galleries, Free on the door
Yon Afro, In Our Own Words - workshop
Sun 13 Aug, 6pm-8pm, Free but ticketed
OOMK workshop
Fri 1 Sep, 11am -3pm, Free but ticketed
Artists Self-Publishing Book Fair
Sat 2 Sep, From 11am, Free on the door
My Bookcase - Meeting Point workshop
Sat 2 Sep, 1pm-3.30pm, Free but ticketed
Ten Books workshop with Sarah Forrest and Amy Todman
Sat 2 Sep, 4.30pm-6pm, Free but ticketed
My Bookcase Small Talk - discussion event
Sun 3 Sep, 1pm-2.30pm, Free but ticketed