Medium: Installation with bookmarks
Dimensions: 21cm x 4cm
'Non-invasive' bookmarks will be slipped between the pages of 50 selected library books and placed back on the shelves. The bookmarks will be shaped as elongated ellipses with rivet-holes on each end. A soft hair-elastic band will be secured through even rivet-hole so that the elastic band acts as a kind of flexible grip the book and bookmark.
The bookmarks would bear relations - either through images and/or text - (tangential, cryptic, obscure or direct) to the content/theme/title etc of the book/chapter/page. The books selected will be relevant to the theme of the exhibition: books on social constructs, ideology, critical theory, cultural studies, architecture, art etc.
These bookmark serve as 'link' - marking and cross-referencing textual events and ideas on the shelves. They could be seen as metonymic progressions, associatively looped. It is hoped that reader will take up a random tail of 'tracking' down these 'marked' books on the shelved and see connections between and within the marked pages of various books. A selection of these bookmarks will also be distributed to the public while the exhibition is on.
The concept of 'hotspots' also suggests the boundaries set up on certain issues which are considered taboo, or too 'sensitive' for the public or community to comment or enter into discourse upon. Yet these are the very zones where negotiations and reconciliations of differing perspectives within a community can be effected. Art often performs within these boundaries and the public encountering these 'hotspots' through art can enter into social, ethical or philosophical discourse on issues otherwise deemed necessary to be invisible, or even non-existent. This engagement is especially relevant when art is encountered in places other than those designated for the 'display' of art i.e. the gallery or 'artspace'.
50 books amongst thousands - hotspots might very well be a case of the chance encounter with the individual leader. Here in the library, through the very private act of reading, a discursive, hopefully pleasurable conversation between the reader, book and artist can take place without the self-conscious awareness of having to isolate the experience as an encounter with 'Art'.
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