The closure of so many libraries in the UK over the last decade has been “violent and vile” and is “absolutely heartbreaking”, the artist Edmund de Waal said as he opened his own temporary library at the British Museum.

De Waal has created an installation titled library of exile, which contains 2,000 books by exiled writers from Ovid and Tacitus to TS Eliot and Judith Kerr.

It was partly inspired by the “toxic environment” refugees have faced over the last 10 years, after De Waal looked at his bookshelf and realised he was surrounded by books written by people in exile. The work is also a celebration of libraries and a meditation on how many have been lost, including in the UK.

The library was a highlight of last year’s Venice Biennale, installed in the city’s Jewish Ghetto. It then went to Dresden and from Thursday it will be open to visitors in the UK for the first time.

“If you think about the violence that has been wreaked on our social fabric over the last 10 years, the closure of libraries has been violent and vile,” De Waal said.

“There are very few spaces where kids can go to be silent and quiet and read books and discover things. The idea that there are 20% fewer libraries open now than there were 10 years ago is absolutely disgraceful.

“We should not be a society that closes libraries. It is absolutely heartbreaking.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Edmund De Waal (pictured) unveils his library of exile. Photograph: Guy Bell/Rex/Shutterstock

De Waal said the closure of any library was an act of fear, “a way of closing down possibilities”.

Visitors to De Waal’s library are encouraged to do things normally frowned on in libraries: talk to people around them and write in the books. When someone finds a book which means a lot to them they can borrow a pencil and write their name on labels inserted in the books.

The library, its walls made from liquid porcelain, includes the work of almost 1,500 writers from 58 countries in dozens of languages and is still growing with people encouraged to suggest new titles.

After six months at the British Museum the books in the library will be donated to the library of the University of Mosul in Iraq, which is being rebuilt after it was burned to the ground in 2015 by Isis. A million books were lost.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest De Waal said he was spurred on by the library of his great-grandfather, which was looted by the Nazis. Photograph: Guy Bell/Rex/Shutterstock

De Waal is an artist best known to some for his beautiful porcelain pots. To others he might be better known as a writer, particularly for his internationally bestselling memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes in which he used his inheritance of 264 Japanese netsuke from his great-uncle Iggie to trace the fortunes of his ancestors, the Ephrussis, one of the richest of Europe’s Jewish banking families.

He said he was spurred by the library of his great-grandfather, which was looted by the Nazis.

“I needed to make a new library. I needed to do something incredibly positive. It was a feeling of: ‘How can I do something which is generative and positive against a landscape of polarisation and rhetoric?’

“It is the most personal and significant thing I’ve done. It feels like a bit of beautiful activism really.”

• Library of exile is in room 2 of the British Museum from 12 March to 8 September.