On Friday 29 April at 7:30pm, NeMe and curators Nathan Jones and Sam Skinner are happy to invite you to the opening of the exhibition BiblioTech. The project is funded by the Arts Council England, and the Cultural Services of the Cyprus Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports and Youth, and supported by Medochemie, AlphaMega, Kimonos Art Centre, and Alinea. BiblioTech is a group exhibition in the form of a library – consisting of new commissions, restagings, archive material, talks, and workshops exploring the changing role of the library, reading, writing and publishing in a post-digital age.

The project will explore the peculiar conditions of the library in 2022. What is the library-as-institution or infrastructure in the context of advanced AI language tools, decentralised storage and certification, shadow libraries, and how might it evolve within the next phases of globalisation entangled with issues from climate change to automation?

The collected artworks and programmed events will examine the increasing integration of reading, writing and publishing technologies into our lives, investigating the growing web of relations between text, image, audio and video-based communication; new forms of ambient media; and the continuing presence of print. Collectively, BiblioTech asks, how can libraries evolve with new forms of literacy and publishing, and what pressures does the modern notion of the civic, freely accessible, public library come under in the present moment?

By investigating the similarities and differences between the gallery and library, BiblioTech considers how a group exhibition composed of a collection of accessible materials, including book-making, archiving projects, and text-based works, may morph into and appropriate the form of a library.

The exhibition will take place in the Exhibition Research Lab in Liverpool and the NeMe Arts Centre in Limassol, and for a period run in both locations simultaneously. The majority of works will be presented in both venues, while some one-off works will be exhibited in only one site. Accordingly, this crossover and correspondence creates a context to explore modes of reproducibility, presence and difference at play in print and digital-based artefacts, and the library and culture more broadly.

The exhibition at the NeMe Arts Centre will include installations and work by Animate Assembly, Anna Barham, Jonathan Basile, Joe Devlin, David Gauthier, Silvio Lorusso, Rosa Menkman, Katie Patterson, Tom Schofield, Erica Scourti, and Jenna Sutela.