Poetry and Performance. The Eastern European Perspective

“Poetry and Performance. The Eastern European Perspective”
at Wrocław Contemporary Museum (Poland). Opening of the exhibition on March 27

Since the second half of the twentieth century, in particular poets and artists in Eastern Europe have taken up the challenge of reflecting on and investigating the instrumentalization of language for communicative and political-ideological purposes. They did so by drawing attention to the material and medial dimension of language, and by creating performative situations for themselves and their audiences within which possibilities of verbal expression could be tested and acted out. “Poetry and Performance. The Eastern European Perspective” exhibition evokes subversive artistic attitudes directed against authoritarian regimes of the past yet also applies to contemporary positions. Now and then, poetry and performance take on an exceptional significance in periods of political crisis, as these ephemeral and flexible art forms enable the reflection of relations and contexts that remain otherwise undiscussed.

The show will be composed of various types of coexisting exhibits: text scores, interactive objects, sound and video recordings, films and installations of performance documentation of over sixty artists ( Katalin Ladik, Mladen Stilinović, Gabriele Stötzer, Ewa Partum, Akademia Ruchu, Vlado Martek, Lev Rubinstein, Tamás Szentjóby, Ľubomír Ďurček, Wojciech Bąkowski, Honza Zamojski, Liliana Piskorska among others). The exhibition will present authors from subcultures in socialist states along with contemporary positions that continue the legacy of combining poetry and performance, showing the efforts of poets and artists to break free from controlled language and normative communicative here and now.

The exhibition will be on display at Wrocław Contemporary Museum (pl. Strzegomski 2a, Wrocław, Poland), from March 27 to June 8. The opening of the exhibition will take place on March 27 at 6:00 pm. The day after – on March 28 at 3:00 pm – Tomáš Glanc, Sabine Hänsgen and Agata Ciastoń, curators of the exhibition, will guide us through the “Poetry and Performance”.

The exhibition was organized in cooperation with the Institute of Slavic Studies of the University of Zurich and riesa efau. Kultur Forum Dresden, with the financial support of the Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation and the Consul General of the Federal Republic of Germany in Wrocław. 

It was produced in collaboration with Dubravka Ðurić, Daniel Grúň, Emese Kürti, Claus Löser, Pavel Novotný, Branka Stipančić, Darko Šimičić, Māra Traumane. 

Exhibition arrangement and visual identification: Hubert Kielan.