WOUNDED BOOKS

The ‘Wounded Books’ on-going sculptural series, conceived by Christina Mitrentse in 2006 and executed initially as a response, amongst others, to the car bombing at Al-Mutanabbi street in Baghdad’s cultural centre. Books shot with Winchester 4.8 Caliber, under licensed conditions. Selected publications from the Wiener Archive & Library, refer to the catastrophes of humanity, collectible books Penguin & Pelican, Titles on Ideology , Greek political texts from PATAKI publications, linguistics, art and history logs. This “performative act” is “absolutely not vandalism”, rather a “homage”, “explor[ing] the possibilities opened up by conceptualist approaches to writing and performative approaches to reading within contemporary society and the subjection to the advanced capitalism in which it exists. The injured hard and paperbacks have the solemn air of bibliographic relics, books that have been laid to rest, codexes whose yellowing pages support content that has become almost epistemologically outmoded and fossilised. Here a bullet hole is as telling as an ISBN or shelfmark. Their ‘deaths’ also indicate that the book be it fact or fiction, is a foot soldier in the never ending war of ideas, by means of which humanity evolves.  

Selected pieces can be found in special collections, including the V&A National Library, MOCA London, Book Arts at UWE, London College of Communication Library Special Collections (UAL), Library Special Collections Chelsea College of Art & Design, the Library of Philosophy University of Barcelona, Women’s Art Library (MAKE) Goldsmiths University, Book Art Centre NY, the National Library in Baghdad, Senate House Library -Birkbeck University London, The Jewish Museum of Greece and in private collections in Europe and UK.

Wounded Books have been featured in the recent publication: THE WORD IS ART published by Thames & Hudson, written by Michael Petry of MOCA London 2018. Article at Art Corpus: The Wounded Books series as a metaphor for Re-Incarnation | Anna McNay, Arts Writer, London 2013 | Article/Interview at InterArtive: Reading Between the Lines | Dr. Christina Grammatikopoulou, Art Theorist, Spain 2012 | Article/Exhibition Review by Vassilios Doupas on The Art News Paper, Athens October 2019