Color Theory at ArtInternational

For SPOT Production Fund’s booth at ArtInternational (2013), 98Weeks and Merve Ünsal installed two takes on the notion of the book bazaar and the personal library. Inspired by a recent project called the ‘Book Bazaar’ where 98Weeks presented a series of artworks by artists, together with publications, objects, and ephemera collected from second-hand bookshops and flea markets. The objects on display were exchanged through barter, following the artists’ request. Marwa Arsanios from 98Weeks took the library and reassembled it according to colorization. Merve Ünsal’s arrangement from her personal library, on the other hand, is inspired by a project that she saw at e-flux in 2011, in 19 which books from the reading room were made available to the viewers for the purposes of looking through the bookmarks in the books—in short, a curated exhibition through bookmarking.

With an element of peaking into the private thoughts, the project was made even more personal in both these cases by the element of exchange. The exchange between the owner of the book and the visitor to the book bazaar in 98 Weeks’ case, and the exchange of thoughts between the original reader of the book and the viewer/reader in Merve’s case. Another layer of personalization is that each categorized their library according to a “color” code—a given set of colors are the agents for free association.