Al-Mutanabbi Street Exhibition in the Hampshire College Art Gallery
The exhibit runs through September 28 and features the work of a diverse group of artists from Europe, North America, and the Middle East who interpreted the tragedy through their own personal lens.
Al-Mutanabbi Street is named after the 10th-century Iraqi poet and had been the center of literary, intellectual, and cultural life in Baghdad for hundreds of years.
Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here "is a tribute to a street that grows into a large and archetypal symbol and spatial metaphor for books. Situated in Baghdad, the city of the Arabian Nights, and in the oldest civilization that brought humanity to learning through writing, al-Mutanabbi Street is a call for all to regain Baghdad's cultural luster instead of letting it fade in violence, greed, exploitation and corruption in a wicked trajectory of dictatorship, invasion, occupation, and comic but dangerous puppets,” wrote Muhsin al-Musawi in the preface to Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here: Poets and Writers Respond to the March 5th, 2007, Bombing of Baghdad's "Street of the Booksellers.”
The exhibition will conclude September 28 at 4:30 pm with a faculty panel addressing some of the questions raised by the artworks, and putting those questions into political, religious, social and artistic context.
All events are free and open to the public. The library gallery is open Monday – Friday, 10:30am -4:30pm and is located on the lower level of the Hampshire College Library. For further information, email bvigeland@hampshire.edu
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