Concrete Experience

10.02.2023 –16.4.2023
Badischer Kunstverein
Waldstraße 3
Karlsruhe
76133
Germany

Concrete Experience presents female artists and poets from the 1960s and 70s who call attention to the sympoietic relationship between the concrete poem and the experience of the perceiving body.

Opening with Lily Greenham’s lingual music piece Experience, the selected artworks invite us to an intermedial reading of the genesis of poems. Blurring the lines of the verbal and the non-verbal, they can be read as scores for poetry to be lived: Betty Danon’s Partitura Asemantica and Liliane Lijn’s Neurographsdevelop autonomous languages borrowing codes from the field of music, technology and science. Power Game is a deck of cards and a casino performance in which Lijn invites the audience to critically observe concepts such as identity, language and power as they play.

Through her experience of writing that doesn’t mean to represent but only to be, Irma Blank offers a vibrant poetry of presence. Wanda Gołkowska’s works are gifted with self-reflexivity and investigate overproduction and overload of information. In Mirella Bentivoglio’s De H a E, the letter H becomes the letter E in a builder’s workshop, undergoing material and letter-to-speech transformation—the process becoming poem.

Ana Hatherly’s Alfabeto estrutural consists of a set of nine form transformations with abstract signs which—as an ongoing poem and an own language system—can be extended continuously. Through the practice of Japanese calligraphy, Chima Sunada reconstructs ideograms that embody ambiguous modifications of meaning through the act of writing. Annalisa Alloatti’s Cecità offers a meditative reflection on the poetry and materiality of the Braille writing system as a binding energy of all senses and the in-between: of meaning, of the visual and the haptic.