***In Eastern Europe, we can observe peculiar sensitivity both to the power of language and its fragility and vulnerability, which has been developing over many decades. In the second half of the twentieth century, poets and visual artists in Eastern Europe in particular took up the challenge of reflecting on and investigating the instrumentalization of language for communicative and political-ideological purposes. They did so by drawing attention to the made-ness of language, its materiality and mediality, and by creating performative situations for themselves and their audiences within which possibilities of verbal expression could be tested and acted out. Poetic performance makes the limits of language and speakability tangible.In the socialist states of Eastern Europe, with all of their differences, poetry and performance are characterized by a double subculturality: on the one hand, they undermine the conventional perception of script and words as neutral means, which, on the other hand, was unacceptable against the cultural-political backdrop, forcing them into the unofficial or partially tolerated cultural scene. (...)***

With:
Akademia Ruchu, Nikita Alekseev, Gábor Altorjay, Pavel Arsenev, Damir Avdić, Wojciech Bąkowski, Bosch+Bosch (Attila Csernik, Slavko Matković, László Szalma), Ľubomír Ďurček, Exterra XX, Else Gabriel, Dorota Gawęda / Eglė Kulbokaitė (Young Girl Reading Group), Rimma Gerlovina, Jelena Glazova, Tomislav Gotovac, Grupa Kolektywne Działania, Grupa OHO (Nuša & Srečo Dragan, Naško Križnar), Grupa Sześciu Autorów, Bohumila Grögerová / Josef Hiršal, Durs Grünbein, Gino Hahnemann, Tibor Hajas, Jörg Herold, Vladimir Kopicl, Jiří Kolář, Dávid Koronczi, Barbara Kozłowska, Romuald Kutera, Katalin Ladik, Juri Leiderman / Andrey Silvestrov, Via Lewandowsky, Vlado Martek, Kirill Medvedev, Jan Měřička, Andrei Monastyrski, Ladislav Novák, Pavel Novotný, NSRD (Hardijs Lediņš, Juris Boiko, Imants Žodžiks), Paulina Ołowska, Roman Osminkin, Andrzej Partum, Ewa Partum, Liliana Piskorska, Agnieszka Polska, Pomarańczowa Alternatywa (Orange Alternative), Bogdanka Poznanović, Dmitri Prigov, PussyRiot, Lev Rubinstein, Gerhard Rühm, Mladen Stilinović, Gabriele Stötzer, Tamás Szentjóby, Bálint Szombathy, Slobodan Tišma, Raša Todosijević, Dezider Tóth (Monogramista T.D), Jaromír Typlt, Jiří Valoch, Honza Zamojski.

The exhibition POETRY & PERFORMANCE – THE EASTERN EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVE, MWW - WROCLAW CONTEMPORARY MUSEUM is curated by Tomáš Glanc, Sabine Hänsgen, Agata Ciastoń