MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE is a not-for-profit project by the artist and writer Sharon Kivland. The publications constitute her library, initially based on her purchase of a hundred ISBN numbers, though she is now into the next lot of numbers. In her role as The Editor, she invites authors she considers to be good readers, whom she would like to live in her library or to become her library, inhabited.
Last year, Kivland asked the authors published by her press to describe the organisation of their libraries for a cahier in the series published by Mette Edvardsen as Afternoon Editions, arranging them according to a singular system that brought the writers together, keeping company with each other and her. The responses were various and diverse. These were the private arrangements of private libraries; even those who had decided to reject books addressed the challenge of organisation.
Our Libraries at Tate Library brings the subjective systems of individual libraries, where orderly and logical access may not be the foremost requirement, to the public forum of a national museum library, free and open to all. There are matters of grouping, organising, categorising, and so on; in both situations, decisions must be made. This event presents the processes of decision-making in what Susan Howe called the ‘telepathy of the archive’.
