Poetry Goes Art – Vice Versa

At the beginning of the 1950s, a new literary avant-garde caused quite a stir as it expanded the catalogue of literary forms and made language itself both the vehicle and focus of their texts. These new literary-graphic pieces of writing, such as collages, image poetry and sound poetry, exhibited a performative character that made them suitable for film, theatre and modern radio play adaptation.
This exhibition illustrated the formal diversity of Concrete Poetry. It released a multimedia edition of exemplary works which, in addition to preserving and safeguarding the artistic material, present the history of Concrete Poetry and its interconnectedness to other media. Concrete Poetry was also known for its international ties, and therefore, the second part of the exhibition focused on references to Switzerland, Brazil, Austria and Sweden in its early phases of development and later to Germany at its most intense phase at the end of the 1950s.
The intensive artistic contact made Concrete Poetry the first global literary movement based on aesthetic principles. Together with an accompanying publication and international symposium, the selected works by six artists from six different countries provided an overview of the formation and development of this cross-disciplinary genre and demonstrated its influence on artistic trends, e.g., digital network texts.

Artistic director: Anne Thurmann-Jajes
Assistant: Patrycja de Bieberstein Ilgner
Participants / artists: Friedrich Achleitner (A), H.C. Artmann (A), Konrad Bayer (A), M. Bense, Gerhard Rühm (A/D), Oswald Wiener (A), Dieter Roth, Marcel Wyss (CH), Franz Mon, Eugen Gomringer (CH/D), Augusto und Haraldo de Campos (BR), Öyvind Fahlström (S), Décio Pignatari (BR), Pedro Xisto (BR) and others

Venues and schedule:
Weserburg – Museum of Modern Art, Bremen, 21 May – 14 Aug. 2011
Symposium, Bremen, 17 – 18 Jun. 2011
Museum for Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo, August – September 2012