1999-2001/2007
Traces of an action over two years: 3 digitally printed billboards, situated on Pakuranga Road, 12 artist books, installed on to a reading table in the Pakuranga Library.
Exh.: organised through the billboard programme at Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Auckland, New Zealand, 15 September-10 February 2008;
On 30 August 1999 East Timorese voted overwhelmingly to become an independent nation in a ballot sponsored by the UN. Following the announcement of the result, occupying Indonesian troops carried out systematic destruction throughout East Timor. Within two weeks several thousand civilians were murdered (a precise number is unknown), 200,000 were forcibly transported to concentration camps in West Timor and other parts of Indonesia, and most significant infrastructure was destroyed.
Books were targeted for destruction. Libraries were systematically burned, amongst them the widely-used university library and the English library in Dili. Private collections of books were targeted, and in notable cases book collections of prominent intellectuals and independence activists were collected on the street where they were publicly set alight. In villages, schools were systematically destroyed. Action for another library was established in Melbourne in response to these circumstances. Thousands of books were donated by bookstores, libraries, and individuals. They were shipped to Dili in containers where they now form part of the nascent National University Library of East Timor. The title pages of some books were photographed before the books were sent to East Timor, and these photographs form the basis of the artist book After action for another library, which was displayed on a reading table in the Pakuranga Library, the local library across the road from Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts.
Three billboards were installed on Pakuranga Road. These were digital prints of three photographs taken of a destroyed library during a visit to Dili in 2000, and also served as 'advertisments' for the reading table in the adjacent library, providing the reading table's site in red text along the bottom of the billboard.
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The artist book, After action for another library, was originally produced to coincide with the exhibition of the installation form of the work at the Humboldt University in Berlin in 2003. A reworked version of the installation was shown in the Sydney Biennale in 2006, and a small publication was produced to coincide with the exhibition of this new form of the work, including 'The Practice of Action', an exchange between Dr Charles Merewether, Artistic Director and Curator of the Biennale, and Tom Nicholson. This work was subsequently exhibited at Anna Schwartz Gallery in Melbourne, 1-30 September 2006.
Background on the history of East Timor leading up to After action for another library.
Credits for After action for another library.
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