“Greetings to the People of Europe” included in a new public artwork by American artist Jenny Holzer

Among the sources that Holzer will include in For Aarhus are several recent prose poems by Ghayath Almadhoun, a Palestinian poet born in Damascus who lives in Sweden. Some of these texts include: “Greetings to the People of Europe!” by Alemu Tebeje Ayele, an Ethiopian poet, journalist, and community activist based in London; a short story set in the immigrant community of Los Angeles by Syrian writer Dima Alzayat; works by a group of young Assyrian Iraqi poets, living in tents in flooded refugee camps in the fall of 2014, whose plight became the subject of a reading vigil held at Cambridge University; and a series of postcards written by displaced residents of Aleppo, Syria, that began when Issa Touma, a local gallery owner and photographer, invited a cross section of people to write about themselves and their experiences— resulting in both a book and a contemporary opera performed in Amsterdam this past autumn. Read More…