Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture will host an international exhibition dedicated to the poetry and performance of Eastern Europe
An international exhibition Poetry and Performance. The Eastern European Perspective will be presented at the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture featuring over 100 works on the intersection of poetry and performance by artists from different countries of Eastern Europe, including Ukraine.
The exhibition’s main focus is on a combination of poetry and performance in artistic reflections and research on language in the dimension of political and ideological influence. The works of poets and artists of the second half of the 20th century and contemporary artists refer to the issues of censorship and artificiality of language, its subordination to ideologies and policies, fragility and vulnerability to various socio-cultural transformations – both in the past and today.
Poetry and Performance. The Eastern European Perspective is the result of a study conducted by researchers and curators Sabine Hänsgen and Tomáš Glanc with the support of the University of Zurich and the European Research Council. The exhibition was first shown in Zurich at the end of 2018, then the collection in its various formats traveled to Dresden, Wroclaw, Liberec, and Budapest.
The show is composed of various types of coexisting exhibits: text scores, interactive objects, sound and video recordings, films and installations of performance documentation. Together, they 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 communication.
The exhibition is divided into several parts, each of them representing one of the formats of poetic performance in Eastern Europe: Writing-Reading Performance, Audio Gestures, Interventions in Public Space, Cinematographic Poetry, Body Poetry, Language Games.
