You must register by 5pm on October 25, 2024 to attend this event.
Please join the Njegoš Endowment for Serbian Language and Culture and the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Sezgin Boynik. Moderated by Aleksandar Bošković.
In his lecture, Sezgin Boynik will introduce the publication Sickle of Syntax & Hammer of Tautology: Concrete and Visual Poetry in Yugoslavia, 1968–1983, which he edited as a special number (# 90–91) of OEI in 2021. Boynik will discuss example Yugoslav experimental poetry through specific historical and political context of socialist Yugoslavia.
Sickle of Syntax & Hammer of Tautology offers the first English-language overview of the history of the production of concrete and visual poetry in socialist Yugoslavia between 1968 and 1983. By focusing on mass-produced examples of concrete poetry, the publication presents these poetic experiments as organically linked to social movements, critical theories, and youth cultural revolutions. In his presentation, Boynik, will discuss the concrete and visual poetry in socialist Yugoslavia as an uneven and combined development, and emphasize its confrontational and organizational aspects.
Among others the publication includes accounts on the early years of OHO formation and its complex theories of words and things; an interview with Rastko Močnik on programmed art and political formalism; militant polemics of Goran Babić; Signalist contradictions; subjective structural devices of Judita Šalgo; zaum experiments of Vojislav Despotov; detective meta-texts of Slavoj Žižek; poetic self-management studies of Vujica Rešin Tucić; a feminist historicization of Ažin school for experimental poetry; democratization of visual poetry by Westeast; selections from special issues of the journals Pitanja, Problemi, Ulaznica, Dometi, Delo, Koraci, Vidik, Pegaz, and many other materials translated into English for the first time and presented in one publication.
Sezgin Boynik is a writer, editor and publisher based in Helsinki. He founded Rab-Rab Press, an independent publishing platform in Helsinki that combines experimental art and leftist politics with scholarly rigour and a punk attitude. He also co-founded Pykë-Presje in Prizren, Kosovo, an independent space using archives to oppose the nation-state narratives. Boynik is also involved in the editorial work of OEI, a Stockholm based magazine dedicated to expanded poetry. Among Boynik’s recent publications are critical editions of Karel Teige’s writings on the art market, the Russian Formalists’ studies of Lenin’s language, the politics of conceptual art, the historical materialist study of visual poetry in Yugoslavia, and the objective form of contemporary art, among others. Boynik also exhibited in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ljubljana, The Showroom in London, the 14th edition of Manifesta Biennale in Prishtina, the 3rd edition of Autostrada Biennial in Prizren, Kalasataman Seripaja Gallery in Helsinki, Agit in Berlin, and SALT in Istanbul (forthcoming).
