Tora Bora Black Dust

 

Art Hazelwood

  1961 - PRESENT (biography)

2011  

book, Opera in a Box, mixed media with engraving, screenprinting & letterpress 

12 x 13 1/2" x 1" box; components vary 

engravings are individually pencil signed, dated and editioned 1/20 

1 of 20  

The accompanying pamphlet is signed by the artist 

 

engravings printed on Hanemuhle Copperplate & Lana Gravure papers; screenprints printed on Hanemuhle Bugra and Arches Watercolor Hot Press 

published 

artist 

ARHA137 

SOLD

Tora Bora is a reverse engineered opera. The Seventeenth Century etcher Jacques Callot’s illustrations of scenes from operas inspired the thought—what if all that remained of an opera were etchings from a few scenes? How, for example, would the Magic Flute be reconstructed from that? With this in mind Art Hazelwood and Klaus-Ullrich Rötzscher began this collaboration. Art Hazelwood engraved the six scenes from the opera Tora Bora. Tora Bora is the name of a mountain cave complex at the center of Afghan contemporary history. The CIA funded the expansion of the caves there to help the Mujahideen fight the Soviets. The Taliban used them, and it was Osama Bin Laden’s last known address, from where he escaped capture by the US. Even now poppy production and Taliban activity is rampant in this rugged mountain area twenty miles from the Pakistan border. The opera is presented in a fold out stage with screen printed covers. The viewer moves through the various scenes of the opera while reading the storyline and lyrics in an accompanying booklet and using seven puppets to enact the scenes. Should a full scale opera appear it will be staged on a larger stage. Fold out boxed opera with seven puppets, six engravings and a letterpress booklet of storyline, in an edition of twenty.