While performance in Western Europe and North America can be understood as a reaction to late capitalist commodity culture with an abundance of material things, performance in Eastern European cultures means above all an engagement with political-ideological culture as a culture of texts, manifestos, instructions, and slogans that have produced an abundance of texts.

Since the second half of the 20th century, poets and artists, in particular, have taken up the challenge of reflecting on and exploring the ubiquitous political-ideological "prescriptions." They do this with aesthetic means, by bringing the material and medial dimension of language into the center of attention and creating performative situations for themselves and their audiences, in which possibilities of alternative linguistic expression are tested, played through, and acted out.

The interrelation between text and situation in poetic acts of writing and reading has - according to a hypothesis of the project - contributed significantly to the development of the genre of performance art in Eastern Europe.

In her lecture, Sabine Hänsgen will present conceptual textual practices and their forms of representation in the exhibition "Poetry & Performance. The Eastern European Perspective" for discussion. Artistic positions from Moscow Conceptualism (Collective Actions, Andrei Monastyrsky, Dmitry Prigov, Lev Rubinstein) will be considered in comparison with positions from Yugoslavia (Tomislav Gotovac, Vlado Martek, Mladen Stilinović), Poland (Ewa Partum, Orange Alternative), Hungary (Katalin Ladik, Tamás Szentjóby) and Czechoslovakia (Ľubomír Ďurček, Jiří Valoch).

The condensed form of poetry & performance again gains special political explosiveness in the current context, as this small and flexible genre can address interrelations that would otherwise remain undiscussed.

The lecture will take place online via Webex as part of the seminar "Graphomanie".

To the WebEx session