An expanse of pale bookcases line the wall of a second-floor gallery at the Aga Khan Museum, shimmering in low light. There’s something quietly reverential about the scene, an implied hush that suggests mourning for something lost.

“They almost look like tombstones, the shadows they make,” says Wafaa Bilal, surveying an array of slim, evenly spaced volumes that stand upright on every shelf here. The memorial, though, is just one half of the greater whole. “I wanted a simple visual representation of what’s been lost,” he says. “But what’s important is that, over time, this place comes back to life.”

For Bilal, an Iraqi-American artist, this project is no mere conceptual project. Every colourless book — blank, cover-to-cover — is meant not to stand sentinel-like for loss, but to quickly leave this place. In Baghdad, the library of the School of Fine Arts has compiled a wishlist of books to replace the 70,000 destroyed or looted in the Iraq War.

When a visitor brings in a volume from the list — or, a little more conveniently, has Amazon deliver one for them — they take home one of Bilal’s stand-ins as a keepsake of their contribution in exchange. (By now, the work’s third presentation, Bilal has managed to gather 2,700 books for the library; 1,000 of them have already been shipped to Baghdad.) The blank books function both as ghosts of the dead and a clean slate, waiting to be filled: As the books arrive and the stand-ins depart, the white shelves enliven with colour and text — and from the void comes the slow, determined reintroduction of life.

A more apt metaphor for the resurrection of Iraq could hardly be imagined. Left in ruins by the most recent American invasion in 2003, the vacuum left by former dictator Saddam Hussein brought internecine battle for control among an array of factions. Most of Iraq’s cultural institutions — libraries, museums — had long since been ransacked by looters when the extremist group Daesh began to flex its muscles, leaving little for it to cleanse (as the extremists liked to imagine it) of the country’s vast cultural heritage. With Daesh — also known as ISIS — only recently expunged, reconstruction has begun in earnest, but it’s slow going at best.

Bilal grew up in the southern Iraqi city of Kufa, one of seven children, the entire family living in a single room. That made the city’s libraries his refuge, both as a place to study and a spot to seek a quiet moment to himself. He grew up under Hussein, enduring two foreign invasions and one internal uprising; he spent time in refugee camps in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Trying to unravel his homeland’s destruction in his art, Bilal, now a professor at New York University, made a string of provocative works — Domestic Tension, in 2005, had Bilal sealed up in a small room for a month, a paintball gun trained at his body, which viewers on the internet could fire at will; Raze 213 recreated an infamous torture technique of the Hussein regime, where nitric acid would drip from pipes on the ceiling down onto a prisoner held captive below.

By contrast, the book project is almost sedate (though contemplative seems more apt). Either way, it’s a practical-minded departure that Bilal enjoys. “To be completely frank, when we talk about war and destruction, when you try to bring that image here, I don’t think it resonates,” he says. “There’s an obsession, I think, with images of conflict — when war is taking place, you want to engage people with that. But what happens post-conflict? Either you move on, or you look and say, what needs to be done now? I want to reflect the time now, and now is about rebuilding.”

As the world’s attention lurches from flashpoint to flashpoint, past disasters can fade from view. From the ever-unfolding disaster in Syria to the ongoing migrant crisis to newly escalating tensions in Gaza, how often does Iraq even merit a headline? It’s easy to forget, 15 years later, that Iraq dominated global concern for years as the U.S. invasion advanced on its mission of deposing Hussein’s regime. Where destruction is immediate and visceral, reconstruction is slow and laborious — a fact with which Iraq has been acquainted for centuries.

Bilal’s project is titled with that in mind: 168:01 derives its name from an anecdote from the 13th-century invasion of Baghdad by the Mongol hordes, who looted the city’s central library, then stuffed with thousands of books in dozens of languages, reflecting its status as the centre of a cross-cultural, enlightened centre. The Mongols, the story goes, dumped books into the river by the thousands, building a bridge of them for troops to cross.

In the water, the books released their ink, turning the river an inky-blue black for seven days (‘168’ is a week, in hours), washing away generations’ worth of learning in moments. It was not, of course, the end of Iraq’s role as a centre of knowledge, and neither will the most recent dissolution be. Iraq has always rebuilt, countless times. Bilal is doing his small part, book by book.

“A lot of artists raise awareness, but ultimately nothing goes to the ground,” he says. “I wanted to raise awareness of the destruction, yes, but at the same time give something tangible back to the people who lost everything.”

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