I was lead artist and co-curator with Nick Norton responding to the theme: Library Interventions: Moving Knowledge.

Library Interventions transforms the Leeds Arts University's Blenheim Walk Gallery into a complex site that re-enacts a repository of knowledge: filled with books and objects, and acting as a site of poetry, performance and moving image.

For Michelle Williams Gamaker, the library is a docufictional platform, where a liminal encounter between the realm of fictional subjectivities and its more rational counterpart of facts can take place. As such, the library holds keys to our individual and collective desires to understand epistemological ‘truth’.

Williams Gamaker will – in collaboration with David Steans, and Clare Charnley & Geoff Clout – and with text-based contributions and readings by the poet Joey Chin – re-stage the Leeds Arts University Library by drawing upon the immersive qualities of games and novels to plunge visitors into a physical renegotiation of the library and its contents, a space full of resonating narratives. What does the library represent to those who enter it?

Miriam Naeh will be joining the Intervention for a symposium screening of her work.

Library Interventions has been running at Leeds Arts University since 2013. It is a programme intended to bring the creative potential of the Library into an active visibility. Artists, designers, writers and performers have been invited into the Library in order to create with/in the Library space and its collection. For the invited artists, the Library Intervention brief is to explore the Library as best they see fit and create a new body of work that responds to some aspect of the collection and/or library environment.

Classifications and definitions are sometimes opportunistic, necessary and yet fleeting. Collections grow and shift, differing formats make access mutable. Choose an archaic format and content becomes fleeting, a historic shadow. Yet when new knowledge is encountered, so is our own sense of being encountered: We are moved. Sometimes the challenge of these encounters make for doubt, the encounter is not always welcomed; but Library Interventions seek the welcome encounter of moving knowledge and knowledge moving.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/21875