Launch of ‘A Bundle of Reeds: Contemporary Art after the Tigris’

Launch of A Bundle of Reeds: Contemporary Art after the Tigris

📅 Saturday 31 October, 15.00–17.00
📍 The National Library, Henrik Ibsens gate 110, Oslo

We’re proud to share that our Artistic Director, Rana Issa, has co-edited A Bundle of Reeds: Contemporary Art after the Tigris, a new book published by OCA and Archive Books. Join us at the National Library for the Oslo launch.

At Masahat, we work to create space for Arab art and culture in Norway, and for stories that are often told from the outside. A Bundle of Reeds does exactly that: it takes a famous Norwegian expedition and looks at it again from the other side of the river, through the eyes of artists and thinkers from the region. We hope to see you there.

The evening opens with a talk by artist Rashad Selim, who was part of the crew on Thor Heyerdahl’s Tigris expedition (1977–78), together with Hannah Lewis, his partner at Safina Projects.

As a young man, Selim joined Heyerdahl’s project to build an ancient-style reed boat and sail it down the Tigris in Iraq, across the Arabian Sea to Pakistan and on towards the Gulf of Aden. Fifty years later, Selim has developed his own kind of “expeditionary art”, where Europe is no longer the starting point. In recent years, he and Hannah Lewis have worked with one of the most basic acts of making, gathering and bundling reeds, as a concrete metaphor for reviving Iraq’s craft traditions, which have been badly damaged by several major conflicts since the Tigris voyage.

At the event, Selim will talk about his life and work, especially the project Ark Re-Imagined (2015–present). Drawing on the metaphor of the Mesopotamian ark, this community-based project works to bring back boatbuilding traditions in Iraq. Through the cultural heritage initiative Ark for Iraq, it has so far led to nine local boat clubs, a maritime museum in Basra and an exhibition at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, among other outcomes. One possible future expedition could take place on the Halden Canal in Norway.

After the talk, Selim and Lewis will be in conversation with the book’s editors, Rana Issa and Mike Sperlinger.

Contributors: Nora Al-Badri, Juan Carlos Arratia Esteban, Sargon Boulus, Hannah Lewis, Zoya Masoud, Dilip Menon, Rijin Sahakian, Rashad Selim, Simon Starling and Pelin Tan
Edited by Rana Issa and Mike Sperlinger
Design by Marwan Kaabour
Published by OCA – Office for Contemporary Art Norway and Archive Books

More information: oca.no/programme/bor