The Hidden Library (Summer 2024)

The Hidden Library (Summer 2024)This four day, virtual workshop takes place on Zoom on Wednesdays, July 24th August 14th from 10: 00AM 12: 00PM ET. Wednesday, July 24th, 10: 00am12: 00pm ET Wednesday, July 31st, 10: 00am12: 00pm ET Wednesday, August 7th, 10: 00am12: 00pm ET Wednesday, August 14th, 10: 00am12: 00pm ET Please Note: Registration for this workshop closes on July 17th, at 11: 59 PM ET. About the Workshop: In this virtual workshop for all experience levels, Instructor

This four-day, virtual workshop takes place on Zoom on Wednesdays, July 24th - August 14th from 10:00AM —12:00PM ET.

• Wednesday, July 24th, 10:00am—12:00pm ET
• Wednesday, July 31st, 10:00am—12:00pm ET
• Wednesday, August 7th, 10:00am—12:00pm ET
• Wednesday, August 14th, 10:00am—12:00pm ET

Please Note: Registration for this workshop closes on July 17th, at 11:59 PM ET.

About the Workshop:

In this virtual workshop for all experience levels, Instructor Shirin Salehi will introduce the participants to the poetics of the hidden in the conception of an Artists' book project, raising questions on how we connect to the notion of the unseen, the silent and the nuances of language in our current visually overexposed times.

Salehi will offer a selection of case studies belonging to different visual languages –drawing examples from sculpture, painting, photography, ceramics, and cinema– for the group to discuss and draw multiple lines and connections through poetical thinking. All students are encouraged to actively participate in discussions throughout the workshop. Though conceptual discussion is the basis of the class’s structure, the instructor will work along with each participant on their ideas and intuitions in order to create the initial structure of personal artists' book project.

The course is open to artists, poets, thinkers, and all creative individuals interested in participating in critique and theoretical discussions related to book arts and to artworks with a specific emphasis on bookness.

Shirin is interested in concepts such as Matter, Memory, and Time, which become reflected in themes of illegibility, erasure, and the hidden.

Required Materials:

No materials or tools are needed in advance of the course. The Instructor will help each participant identify what they need based on their respective projects. 

About Shirin Salehi

Shirin Salehi (she/her) is a Spanish-Iranian visual artist, art researcher, and teacher living and working in Madrid and New York.

Shirin Salehi’s practice explores the relationships between thinking and making in the language of printmaking, exploring a register that usually focuses on the reproduced image to explore the dialectic between the concepts of time, memory, matter, and gesture of inscription. She investigates the expansion of printmaking from its grammar to other territories of interdisciplinary exploration working with sculpture, video, still images, and artist’s books. From the relationship between her two cultures emerges her interest in the tensions in the illegible image, the failed translation, and the veiled.

In parallel to her work as an artist, she is also an art teacher, a translator of Persian poetry, and an interpreter for asylum seekers. She has developed workshops on artist’s books and artistic thinking in multiple centers. She has taught at the Center for Book Arts in New York and at the LENS School of Cinema and Photography. In 2021 she was invited by the Foundation Amigos del Museo del Prado as a lecturer for the program Enfoques.

All images courtesy of the instructor.