Haus für Poesie

Gestaltung (c) studio stg

Speak Your Mind
Highlights of concrete, visual and sound poetry, Berlin
Exhibitions, readings, talks, tours, performances and workshops
Free admission for all exhibitions and events except colloquium, workshop, live-performance and ZEBRA-Poetry Film Club

As part of the 19th poesiefestival berlin, Berlin galleries and collections are presenting their highlights of concrete, visual and sound poetry. Come and discover classics of the genre, which were media art even before the term was invented, and contemporary work seeking dialogue with its predecessors and exploring new approaches in dealing with language, script, sound and media.

Exhibition openings in the galleries
24 May | 7-9 pm

Galerie und Verlag Broken Dimanche Press | Mareschstraße 1 | S Sonnenallee
Galerie Edition Block | Prager Str. 5 | U Spichernstraße
Galerie Manière Noire | Waldenserstraße 7A | U Turmstraße
Galerie Oqbo | Brunnenstraße 63 | U Voltastraße
BQ | Weydingerstraße 10 | Upstairs | U Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz

Mareschstraße 1 | S Sonnenallee

Exhibition Natalie Czech & John Holten: Negative Calligrams – There’s Nothing There
25 May - 31 May | daily except Sunday 3-7 pm
Artist Natalie Czech, whose work blurs the act of writing and photographing, is joined by Berlin-based writer and ongoing collaborator John Holten to consider the conflation of language, fiction and photographic imagery. Through reading and conversation, the pair explores the close relationship between reading and seeing.

Artist’s Talk with Natalie Czech'
24 May | 7 pm
Presenter: John Holten
In a reading and in conversation with Berlin-based writer and publisher John Holten, Natalie Czech considers the conflation of language, fiction and photographic imagery and the close relationship between reading and seeing.

Henning Christiansen: Die Freiheit ist um die Ecke 2008

Prager Str. 5 | U Spichernstraße

Exhibition Writing is Showing. Text images and objects from Edition Block
25 May - 14 July | daily except Sunday 11 am-6 pm | Saturday 12-6 pm
René Block opened his gallery in Berlin in 1964 to confront the city divided by the Wall with “Capitalist Realism“, Fluxus and sound works. In parallel he has been developing since 1966 an extensive programme of graphics and multiples; the exhibition will be showing works from this covering half a century that relate to language, enabling visitors to get an insight into the many different poetic, political and conceptual strategies by which art makes words visible.

“Skip It If You Can”. Reading with Schuldt
28 May | 6 pm
In a spectacularly rhythmic performance the author realises an acoustic “tour de force”. The highly primitive texts deal with words as with percussion. Language as aggressive music. Angry Street Corner Poetry from the New York of the 80s (Segue Books &belleville, New York & Munich 2017).

Anke Becker: Aus der Serie Grey Headlines

Waldenserstraße 7A | U Turmstraße

Exhibition Amidst Two Points. Anke Becker and Arnold Dreyblatt
25 May - 31 May | daily 3-7 pm
The “Amidst Two Points” exhibition features works by Anke Becker and Arnold Dreyblatt. The viewer will have the chance to see text-based works as well as works based on text-erasures. “Writing Cage” by Arnold Dreyblatt and “Grey Headlines” by Anke Becker play with what we assume to be beginnings and ends, whereas all the “in-betweens” will be found in a continuous alteration.

Artists’ talk and reading with Anke Becker and Arnold Dreyblatt
29 May | 6 pm
Presenter: Myriam Naumann
This Artists’ Talk is devoted to the movements of language. Both Becker’s Grey Headlines, taken from articles in the New York Times and Dreyblatt’s series Writing Cage which works with text fragments by John Cage open up a field of incessant linguistic presence and absence. The Talk will explore the appearance and disappearance of signs, look into the interstices of language and explore the archive’s artistic positions. The talk will be complemented with a reading by Arnold Dreyblatt.

Galerie Oqbo Claus Bremer o.T. aus Texte und Kommentare Anabas Verlag 1963

Brunnenstraße 63 | U Voltastraße

Exhibition Types of Typewriting. Typewritten texts since the 1960s
25 May - 23 June | daily except Sunday 3-6 pm
Concrete Poetry emancipated the typewriter at the end of the 1950s from being just a writing aid to make it into a medium for creating text images. Early work used available typefaces and signs within existing mechanical limits to make poetic reductions, usually in geometric forms. Text images and experiments later became ever more composed or much wilder, sometimes even pure formations of diacritics. Proponents of Concept Art, Minimal Art and Fluxus came to use the medium as well. Today the typewriter is enjoying a comeback in art and literature as an antidote to the impersonal smoothness of the computer.

KOOK.lyrik: Reading by Cia Rinne, Dagmara Kraus and Daniel Falb
30 May | 6 pm
Presenter: Daniela Seel
Daniel Falb, Dagmara Kraus and Cia Rinne synthesise various languages, codes and historical layerings  in their work, operating with minimalist, conceptual and philosophical procedures, thinking poems as graphics and installation. This evening they will be presenting new texts visually and in readings and talking about what drives their poetics. The evening is hosted by Daniela Seel.

(c) Kriwet, Courtesy: BQ, Berlin; Foto: Roman März, Berlin

Weydingerstraße 10 | Upstairs | U Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz

Exhibition: Kriwet
25 May - 31 May | daily except Sunday and Monday | 11 am-6 pm
Kriwet’s first literary work, Rotor, written in lower-case letters with no punctuation or spaces, is an exploration of language not just in its paradigmatic contexts of meaning but also looking at it as a concrete visual and phonetic material. One of the first of what were later known as multi-media artists, Kriwet took this practice from Concrete Poetry over into other media in the 1960s and 70s, creating sound collages, film montages and serial graphics which he reproduced using print media and circulated, printing linguistic raw materials and neologisms on to sheets of metal and tarpaulin, and using the distribution mechanisms of advertising while at the same sending up its jargon. What all these works have in common is a concentration on the materiality of language beyond its representative function as a signifier of the meaning of a single, unambiguously determinable signified.

(c) Friederike Feldmann/Galerie Barbara Weiss

Karl-Marx-Straße 275-277 | U Grenzallee

“PS. Studio visit Friederike Feldmann”
26 & 27 May | 11 am-6 pm
“Friederike Feldmann focuses primarily on painterly core aspects such as gesture, texture and representation. […] In her word pictures, begun in 2011, Feldmann takes the individual gesture exactly along the boundary between ‘peinture’ and ‘écriture’ – and reveals in the appearance of the written word a masterly calligraphic painting.” Jens Asthoff, 2011.

Kulturforum Potsdamer Platz | Matthäikirchplatz 6 | S + U Potsdamer Platz

Highlights from the Jasia Reichardt Collection and the Editions of Hansjörg Mayer
26 May | 11 am-3 pm
Acquired in 1979 by the Berlin State Museums, this collection of concrete and visual poetry by the British art critic and curator Jasia Reichardt includes many one-offs and graphics, artists’ books, series and portfolios, rare magazines and exhibition catalogues from around 1960. The artists include Claus Bremer, Klaus Burkhardt, John Furnival, Ilse and Pierre Garnier, Dom Sylvester Houédard, Jiří Kolář, Gerhard Rühm and many more. The highlights of the collection also include the editions of the publisher Hansjörg Mayer. This presentation in the Study Room of the Art Library – Berlin State Museums shows a representative selection comprising an exclusive insight into this excellent collection.

Hanseatenweg 10 | S Bellevue

Exhibition: Sound of Poetry of Sound. Acoustic Literature from the Archive of S Press Tonbandverlag
25 May - 31 May | daily 10 am-9 pm
Glass Walkway
Founded in 1969, S Press Tonbandverlag is an exception in the German-speaking area with some 100 releases of tapes and cassettes as part of an acoustic literature project. Taking a huge publishing risk, the press created over 35 years an incomparable body of experimental audio poetry. Highlights from the archive held by the Academy of Arts are presented at two listening points.

Exhibition: Sound Music. Sounds. Music. Selected Works from Rumpsti Pumsti
25 May - 31 May | daily 10 am-9 pm
Glass Walkway
The exhibition presents selected works from Rumpsti Pumsti (music) – Shop for Sound Art, Artists’ Records and Music, highlighting publications and artists from the shop’s own Tochnit Aleph label.
www.tochnit-aleph.com | www.Rumpsti-Pumsti.com

Ververbüntede. Concert for voice and dictation machine with Michael Barthel
27 May | 2.30 pm
Club Room
No late admittance
Ververbüntede is a smorgasbord of poems and sound poetry pieces interrogating the functionality of alliances, here primarily in extreme situations. What desires and perspectives for the future are formed around the alliance and from the circumstances of an alliance? Is the way the title is written confusion or corréspondance? What does the beggar’s “Have a nice day, now” really mean?
The theme of the work of Michael Barthel is localisation  - protection, flight, homeland and the possibilities that want to be ascribed to these terms. In the concerts, the voice circumscribes these possibilities, touches and hesitates, seeks cover and is left to its own devices. A choir in itself.

Arrièregarden. A Follow-Up on Concrete Poetry
Colloquium
27 May | 11 am-2 pm
Club Room
€ 8/5
“Concrete Poetry is not a cul-de-sac / There are people who claim that. That just shows that they are complete idiots” Ann Cotten
With Hannes Bajohr | Derek Beaulieu | Andreas Bülhoff | Annette Gilbert |Karl Holmqvist | Thomas Thiel | Georg Witte
Special Guest: Eugen Gomringer
Presented by Michael Lentz
Concrete Poetry has long been declared dead; but now it is undergoing an astonishing revival. Forgotten ideas are being rediscovered and its legacy is being remapped. At the same time, working with the concrete materials of poetry – language, signs, script, image and sound – is more contemporary than ever in an age of ones and zeros. In the border area between literature, art, music and machine the young generation of the avant-garde is sounding it out and continuing its development under the political and media conditions of now. What can Concrete Poetry say to us, and what critical potential does it unfold?

“Linguistic Surprises non-stop. Listening examples from the S Press Tonbandverlag”
Presented by Marc Matter
27 May | 3 pm
Glass Walkway
Marc Matter, proven connoisseur of the history of acoustic literature, presents highlights from the programme of the legendary S Press Tonbandverlag and explains their background and the historical context of this publishing project that is unique in the German-speaking countries. The presentation will include audio examples and close-ups of artistic sound experiments.

“Linguistic experiments between human and machine. Artistic potentials of electro-acoustic manipulation of language”
Workshop for trying out and doing it yourself with Marc Matter
29 May | 3 pm
Studio for Electro-Acoustic Music
€ 6/4
Under the guidance of sound artist Marc Matter participants can actively explore the artistic potential of electro-acoustic manipulation of language. Using examples from the collection of the legendary S Press Tonbandverlag the possibilities of individual “phonetic machines” are demonstrated, from the tape recorder as an instrument for poetry to stereophony and multi-channel spatial sound to sound effects and digital techniques for processing, dissecting and dissolving language. A rare opportunity to experience the resounding connection between poetry and electronic audio technology and to be part of making it happen.

The workshop is intended for interested complete beginners as well as people who have already had some experience with electronic sound processing.

A Dialogue in Sound Writing. Electro-acoustic live-performance with found linguistic material by Marc Matter and Andreas Bülhoff
31 May | 3 pm
Studio for Electro-Acoustic Music
€ 6/4
In this performance the sound and language artists Andreas Bülhoff and Marc Matter come together for the first time to have an abstract dialogue in a duo situation using found language material. Verbal sound gestures – parasemantic ancillary sounds of spoken language – are involved as well. Marc Matter starts things off with an introduction to his latest radio composition based on scraps of language from radio news and newspaper headlines. Then conceptual approaches and algorithmic processes are used to search the texts and compose new texts from the found pieces, making them audible using samplers, automatic language output, software instruments and electro-acoustic studio technology. The interplay between the two sound artists involves alternating between prepared and improvised passages exploring the transitions between written and spoken language.

The exhibition ‘Sound of Poetry of Sound’ and the electro-acoustic live performance ‘A Dialogue in Sound Writing’ and the workshop ‘Linguistic experiments between human and machine’ are made possible by the kind support of the Archive of the Academy of Arts and the Studio for electro-acoustic music.

ZEBRA-Poetry Film Club: Concrete. Digital
Presented by: Alexander Gumz, poet Berlin | Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel, Artistic Director of the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival Münster Berlin
29 May | 9.30 pm
Studio
€ 6/4
The focus of the Poetry Film Club is on visual, concrete and digital poetry. A selection of the best poetry films from the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival will be shown, films which combine word, sound and image in unique ways. The programme includes fascinating image worlds based on poems by Brigitta Falkner, Robert Lax, Mina Loy, Ottar Ormstad and Jörg Piringer.

The ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, founded in 2002 by the Haus für Poesie, is the biggest platform for short films based on poems.

Curator: Annette Gilbert
Project leaders: Annette Gilbert | Isabel Ferrin-Aguirre | Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel | Tina Brüser (assistance) | Pablo Vollmer (assistance)