18.04.24 – 31.05.24, Benny Nemer, Essential Reading

Essential Reading is a project that aims to enlarge, diversify and enrich Kunstenbibliotheek’s book collection. Which books are, today, really indispensible for an art library? Guests of Essential Reading bring together and present in the library the books they consider most valuable in their life and work.

Benny Nemer

Benny Nemer is an artist, diarist, and researcher based in Paris. Born in Montreal in 1973, he is the grandson of Quebec potter Rosalie Namer (1925–2006), whose artistic kinship instilled in him an early aesthetic sensibility that included an appreciation of objects, a practice of epistolary writing and a sympathy with flowers. His artworks often trace the affective contours of love and longing while facilitating bonds of kinship between his audience, figures from history and himself.

Nemer completed a practice-led PhD at the Edinburgh College of Art in 2019, where he was part of Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures, a pan-European research project led by art historians, cultural anthropologists, and artists. 

He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at KASK & Conservatorium, where he is pursuing research into queer kinship in the spectre of AIDS, postcards as an artistic medium and the archive of French author and photographer Hervé Guibert. Nemer has exhibited internationally, and his work is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna), the Ystads Konstmuseum (Ystad) and Thielska Galleriet (Stockholm).