Created between 2003 and 2009, “Connections” is a series of color photographs of an eponymous sculpture by Mounir Fatmi. The sculpture is composed of a multitude of books, in Arabic and French, covering a wide variety of subjects. Some books are displayed lying down, some are upright, all are connected by a mass of multi-colored electrical cables. The photographs act like a magnifying glass – zooming in on the installation and allowing us to identify the precise nature of the works that have been chosen by the artist: religious texts, philosophical treaties, murder mysteries, works of investigative journalism, political and historical non-fiction.


The “Connections” series examines the book and the act of reading from a particular angle: that of the connection between the works, often referred to as “intertextuality.” Thus, the photographs (and the sculpture) focus our attention on the relationship between the various books, and the knowledge contained within them. Books appear frequently in Mounir Fatmi’s work. They symbolize both the propagation and transmission of knowledge, and the eventual censorship that can ensue. “Connections” plays with heterogeneity: both in the choice of materials used in the sculpture’s composition, and in the choice of the books themselves. The viewers are invited to lose themselves in the wide variety of genres and styles on view, as well as in the intricate puzzle of the books’ connectedness. We attempt to follow the cables to determine which book is connected to which, and why. “Connections” stimulates the spectator’s curiosity while simultaneously destabilizing us, preventing us from identifying a center to the composition – no work is more important than another, no one work holds more authority than another in this assemblage of literary knowledge. 


The piece asserts a certain vision of reading and of intellectual activity in general. To the artist, reading and reflection are fundamentally about drawing connections: a book does not exist in a vacuum, but in relationship to other texts – adding to them, modifying them, contradicting them. Indeed, at the core of the idea of intertextuality, and indeed at the core of all forms of relationship building, is the desire to discover or create links between elements that, on the surface, seem to have nothing in common. In this way, the act of reading becomes like a journalistic or criminal investigation (as certain books on view attest), requiring the reader to connect the necessary clues. To use the analogy of an electrical network, reading is an activity that is intense, energetic… and not without risk. Reading confers great liberty upon the reader, it is therefore of great threat to dogmatic ideologies everywhere. We are never so free as when we read to make the connections that we desire.


Studio Fatmi, April 2017.