Mohammad Sharaf made an installation on November 22, to point the finger at the censorship exercise practiced by the Kuwait Book Fair. As ActuaLitté had indicated, a law enacted in 2006 in the country indicates that the works available during the 43rd edition of the festival go through a censorship commission.
This year, 948 works were stopped at the borders, carriers of textually transmissible diseases – such as humanism or tolerance, formidable! Over the past five years, it is estimated that more than 4,000 books have been banned or censored, at literary fairs and events in the country, but also banned from sale in bookstores.
A cemetery in the fairgrounds #Ban_in_Kuwaitpic.twitter.com/J1oiQmbNO6
– Mohammad Sharaf | Honor (@MohammadRSharaf) November 22, 2018
This time, says the artist, the project was intended to emerge from the walls of a gallery: “That’s why I opted for an outdoor installation. So I made 200 wooden stelae, and I wrote the titles of certain forbidden books on them. I placed them in a vacant lot not far from the exhibition center where the Book Fair was held, ”he explains, quoted by France 24.
It did not take more than three hours for security to remove the stelae – no authorization was requested, this happening obviously could not last very long. Except that, on the networks, the images and photos circulated, taken up by the media.
At this time, we still do not know why and according to what criteria Kuwaiti censorship can strike. Only the possibility of talking about this practice allows us to put up little resistance …
We can discover on the site Mohammad Sharaf’s various creations of which he is author – many of them are oriented towards books, writing or even typewriters.
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