Fr. 19.10. 17:00 Saal 1
This retrospective will honour the life work of poetry film pioneer Gerhard Rühm. Born in Vienna in 1930, Rühm, an artist and writer and co-founder of the Vienna Group, will be presenting in person a selection from the more rarely seen of his poetry films. Since the 1950s, Rühm has been experimenting with new genres such as »visual music« and »auditive poetry«, and producing dialect and sound poems, radio plays, stories, photo montages, book objects and – often in collaboration with other film makers – literary films and cinematic language art. With influences from Dada and Expressionism, his work is primarily characterised by wordplay, dark humour, consistent use of lower case and a playful approach with at the same time radical reduction and economy. Rühm was also professor of free drawing at Hamburg Art School from 1972–1996 and received an honorary doctorate from Cologne University in 2010. He has been awarded many prizes and distinctions for his work, including the Great Austrian State Prize for Literature in 1991 and the Alice Salomon Poetics Prize in 2007. Sonja Hochecker’s documentary »Ruhm mit ü – Die Welt des Gerhard Rühm« (A 2010) will be showing on a monitor in the foyer. With the kind support of Interspot Film GmbH.
With the kind support of the German Literature Fund, the Study Centre for Artists‘ Publications, Weserburg, Bremen, and Interspot Film